Mrs. Everything BOOK CLUB KIT From Jennifer Weiner, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Who Do You Love and In Her Shoes, comes a smart, thoughtful, and timely exploration of two sisters’ lives from the 1950s to the present as they struggle to find their places—and be true to themselves—in a rapidly evolving world. Mrs. Everything is an ambitious, richly textured journey through history—and herstory—as these two sisters navigate a changing America over the course of their lives. Dear Book Club Readers, AUTHOR PHOTO © ANDREA CIPRIANI MECCHI This book has the greatest scope of any I’ve ever written, spanning decades and social movements, and in it I’ve tried to tell the truth about two sisters—about their loves and losses, about their search for happiness and authenticity, about their daughters and their granddaughters, about where we’ve been and where we still have to go. I hope it’s fun and entertaining. I hope, too, that while the individual characters’ choices and actions might not feel tremendously consequential—get married or not? Have babies or not? Go back to work or not?—the book will feel big, in terms of the questions it raises: have we made progress, or are we just walking in circles? Have things gotten better, and what will it take to bring about real progress? I hope that Mrs. Everything is entertaining. I hope these women are good company. I hope you’ll catch a glimpse of yourself, or maybe your own mother and your own daughter in these pages. I hope this book makes you laugh, and that it also makes you think. Thanks for reading, Spotify Playlist LISTEN HERE bit.ly/MrsEverythingPlaylist Fool Fool Fool Draft Dodger Rag Gimmie Gimmie The Clovers Phil Ochs Shock Treatment The Ramones Paper Doll Help Me, Rhonda Frank Sinatra The Beach Boys Like a Virgin Madonna Mona Lisa Ticket to Ride Nat King Cole The Beatles For Once In My Life Stevie Wonder Mister Sandman Runaround Sue Diana Ross & The Supremes Dion (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman I’m Gonna Wash That The Twist Aretha Franklin Man Right Outa My Hair Chubby Checker Nellie Forbush, Total Eclipse of The Ken Darby Singers My Girl the Heart The Temptations Bonnie Tyler Some Enchanted Evening Chain of Fools Physical Aretha Franklin Frank Sinatra Olivia Newton-John Can’t Help Falling Fever You Make My Dreams Peggy Lee In Love Daryl Hall & John Oates Elvis Presley At Last Miss You Much Etta James Be My Baby Janet Jackson The Ronettes California Dreamin’ Smells Like Teen Spirit The Mamas & The Papas Little Boxes Nirvana Pete Seeger Desperados Under When I Come Around Blowin’ in the Wind the Eaves Green Day Bob Dylan Warren Zevon Come To My Window Maggie’s Farm Second Hand News Melissa Etheridge Bob Dylan Fleetwood Mac Single Ladies Boots of Spanish I Am Woman (Put a Ring on It) Helen Reddy Leather Beyoncé Bob Dylan Jive Talkin’ As Cool As I Am Bee Gees Long Black Veil Dar Williams Joan Baez This reading group guide for Mrs. Everything includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book. Topics & Questions for Discussion 1 | Jo and Bethie are very different people. But in what ways do you find them similar? Do their similarities outweigh their differences? How do their similarities cause problems in their relationship? 2 | Forgiveness, of others and of the characters’ own selves, is an important theme in the novel. Discuss how the characters work through their conflicts and how they do or do not resolve the issues. 3 | Compare and contrast how Jo and Bethie are influenced by their mother. Is there a defining element of their relationship with their mother? How does it weave its way into the sisters’ lives? 4 | Mrs. Everything spans half of the twentieth century and the early part of the twenty‑first. What period details made you feel immersed in each decade? Were there any details that you remembered from your own past? Were there details about life in earlier decades that surprised you? What effect did this have on your reading experience? 5 | In Mrs. Everything, Jennifer Weiner has created many memorable secondary characters, from Mrs. Kaufman to Lila to Jo’s and Bethie’s partners and beyond. Did you have a favorite? What qualities made them come alive for you? 6 | Were you ever frustrated by the choices Jo and Bethie made? Did you empathize with their choices, despite feeling frustrated? 7 | Literature is full of sisters with complex relationships. Do Jo and Bethie remind you of other favorite sister duos? What is it about the sister relationship that captivates us as readers? 8 | What draws Jo and Shelley together? After they’ve reunited, what keeps them together? 9 | What do Bethie and Harold learn from each other throughout their relationship? 10 | Because Mrs. Everything takes places over several decades, it touches on many political and social movements. Did you learn anything about American history while reading? Was there a cause or issue that particularly interested you? 11 | When Lila visits Bethie for the summer, they have a heart‑to‑heart about the pressure Lila feels from her mother to be special and achieve great things. Bethie tells Lila that it comes from the lack of options the sisters had growing up in a different era: “Some girls did grow up and became doctors and lawyers and school principals…A few girls did grow up and do things, and got those jobs, but for the rest of us, we were told that the most important thing was to be married, and be a mother…She just doesn’t want that to be the only choice you have” (page 392). Though Lila does have more opportunities available to her than her mother and aunt did, she (and her generation) faces new challenges. Did you relate to Lila’s concerns? 12 | How does faith—both religious and in a more general sense—inform Jo and Bethie? What does faith mean to the sisters? Enhance Your Book Club 1 | If your group hasn’t already read Jennifer Weiner’s novel In Her Shoes, consider reading it together and comparing its themes of sisterhood with those of Mrs. Everything. What similarities do you notice between the sisters in these two novels? What ideas and feelings does Jennifer Weiner explore in both? 2 | Choose one of the eras from the novel and come to your book club dressed in clothes or donning fun accessories from the period. Pick a film set in that same decade and discuss how the director and Jennifer Weiner each evoke that moment in history. 3 | Visit Jennifer Weiner’s website at JenniferWeiner.com to learn more about her and her books, and follow her on Instagram @JenniferWeinerWrites. 4 | Listen to audio excerpts of Jo and Bethie read by Beth Malone and Ari Graynor: Jo: bit.ly/Audio-Jo Bethie: bit.ly/Audio-Bethie 5 | Which Mrs. Everything character are you? Take the quiz at bit.ly/MrsEverythingQuiz and find out! A Conversation with Jennifer Weiner (originally featured in Marie Claire) Marie Claire: What inspired you to write Mrs. Everything? Jennifer Weiner: The 2016 election. Like many women, I thought we were going to wake up the morning after election day in one America, and instead we all woke up in another America. I wanted to write a book that spoke to women’s issues and looked at women’s history and talked about where we’ve been and where we are now and where we need to go next. This is the biggest, most ambitious [book] I’ve ever done—it takes place over seventy years. With this one, I wanted to consider the whole span of history. MC: What makes your book timely? Why should people read it now? JW: We’re at a critical moment in United States history and—to use the really bad AUTHOR PHOTO © ANDREA CIPRIANI MECCHI cliché—we’re at a crossroads. We’re in a moment where we’re deciding what America is going to look like: who’s going to have rights and privileges and who isn’t. If I could give someone a “If we go back in terms reason to read this book, I’d tell them, “Let me show of reproductive rights, you what it would be like if we were to go back to the time that people refer to when they talk about ‘making the way we see and America great again.’ Let me show you what the ‘50s treat women in the and the ‘60s were like for women. Your mother and your world, and whether we sisters have lived in a world that didn’t always let them be completely who they are. If we go back in terms of believe their stories or reproductive rights, the way we see and treat women in not...let me show you the world, and whether we believe their stories or not... what would happen.” let me show you what would happen.” MC: If you could be one character in the book, who would you be and why? JW: I think I’d be Lila just because she’s the youngest and has the most opportunity and the most freedom in front of her, even though that freedom can turn into its own kind of burden, where there’s so much pressure for women to have it all.