The Memory Fare: discussion questions for book clubs

About this guide

The whole book is a single journey, told in fifty short chapters over five parts. It runs about 24,000 words, so a group can comfortably read it in a week and discuss it in a single session. The questions below follow the book's order; the first eight can be discussed by anyone past Part Two, and the rest need the ending.

If your group has read Before the Coffee Gets Cold, The Midnight Library or Piranesi, those are the natural comparisons; the book shares their single-rule premise but refuses their consolation.

The questions

1. Cora searches for her daughter's handwriting rather than her daughter, because looking for June directly would kill her. What other indirect searches does the book contain, and what does it suggest about how people survive looking for someone?
2. The conductor says the open door behind Cora is the better offer, and I'd take it. Nobody ever has. Why does the book make the honest option unliveable?
3. “You will never feel it go.” How does the absence of any sensation change what it means to sacrifice something? Is a sacrifice you cannot feel still a sacrifice?
4. Cora writes her memories down in a ledger and discovers, at door nine, that reading them back tells her what she has spent. She then writes: Don't read them. You can't afford to know. Is she right? What would you do?
5. The train charges the same for a boiler room as for a car full of luggage. Abel calls it optimising the rate at which you destroy yourself when Cora develops a ten-second method. Is her speed a failure of care or the only sane response to the pricing?
6. Eilish Devane has spent so much she cannot say who she is looking for, and will not get off because I've paid such a lot. Is she the book's warning, or its most honest character?
7. Abel Quist has opened eleven doors in fourteen years and calls himself a coward. Cora, at four doors an hour, is proud of herself. Which of them is the book harder on, and does it change its mind?
8. Lumi says the train doesn't take from you, it gets you to give, and gets the most from people who believe they have done something they cannot put right. Where else in the book does guilt function as currency?
9. June boarded wanting her mother frightened for one day. Lumi calls what followed a thing a frightened child decides, and then spends six years trying to make into a good deed. How much of June's rescue operation do you read as goodness, how much as penance, and does the book think the difference matters?
10. Cora switches from spending memories of June to spending everything else she has ever been, and finds it easy. Abel is frightened that she finds it interesting. What is the book saying about the self, that a person can be deleted without protest by the person being deleted?
11. Abel keeps a written copy of Cora on the back of his map so that someone will have her. Cora later says she is a set of instructions in Abel Quist's bag. Is a person who exists only in someone else's record still a person? Does the book answer this, or only ask it?
12. The two rules (your coin is the person you would go back for; you cannot spend on yourself) force the ending. Did you see the mutual inking coming? Is it a solution or a defeat?
13. Neither woman knows the other on the platform. The book gives the recognition to Abel and to the reader and withholds it from Cora and June. Why? Would the book be better or worse if one of them had kept something?
14. Eilish refuses the door June bought her: Off there it would only be a coat and a bag and a lot of Tuesdays. Cora chooses the Tuesdays. Which of them do you side with, and did the book move you from where you started?
15. The last thing Cora does is sign the visitor book, continuing a column of her own signature she cannot remember making. What is the book's final position on what a record is for?

If you have time for one more

Cora's line in chapter thirty-eight is a good place to end a session, because groups tend to split on it: The last one's the only one that was ever worth anything. The rest was just what I had in my pockets. Ask the room whether that is true of them.

The natural next book is The Forty-Year Passenger, which begins in the minute after this one ends, from Abel's point of view, and answers the question a group will already have asked: what does a man who never spends do with fourteen memories of a brother?