Alone With You in the Ether

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This reading group guide for Alone With You includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Marisa Silver. 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. Talk about the temporary things in Vivian’s life – her living situation, her job, her friends. How do they shape her? What kind of person is she? You started out writing and directing films. What made you decide to go to graduate school and switch to writing short stories and novels? Do you ever see yourself returning to screenwriting and/or directing? I really think you’ll love LifeCare,” Ms. Holiday says once she realizes I’m not going to reply, and nudges the pamphlet closer. “It’s a great program—” Regan’s art exhibit was so cliché that I couldn’t believe it. Really? We’re going in this direction? This is the big finale? How basic! This book was set up to be so much more than that— so much edgier than that— what happened?! How did we end up in Live, Laugh, Love territory?

It was at moments like this, high enough to inhale the promise of risk, that the whittled lines of city streets brought out his lingering melancholy; that l'appel du vide, the call of the void.” Many of my stories explore the issues of separation and intimacy, and I think that these issues are brought to the fore when the possibility of loss is most immanent. These stories are never only, or even mostly, about illness or loss. These threads are always part of a greater weave that is full of humor and moments of happiness and moments of connection. It’s all happening the same time, just like life. Mother-daughter relationships are featured prominently throughout Alone With You. In many instances, the daughter ends up behaving more like a mother figure. Compare these relationships in two or more stories. What do they share, and how are they different?

Lethally smart. Filled with a cast of brilliantly realized characters, each entangled with one another in torturously delicious ways, The Atlas Six will grip you by the throat and refuse to let go. Olivie Blake is a mind-blowing talent.” — Chloe Gong, author of New York Times bestselling These Violent Delights Alone With You in the Ether plays with narrative structure and linear time to weave a story of two broken people crashing together like comets, and we, as audience, are witness to their glorious destruction." — Tor.com

The director of the agency assured them that they had done well in the interview process, but that it was her job to match the right children with the right parents and this effort could take time. Not really. That’s how we progress as a culture. We change our minds and, little by little, we become something else.” if art is supposed to make you feel something, then this book is art in its purest form, for there is no emotion this book hasn’t made me feel. After the critical acclaim for The God of War, did you feel pressure to live up to expectations with Alone With You?Eloise Deane is a gamer, a loner who wears it proudly (even though she would rather not), and would rather get through her senior year without people getting in her way, but when she starts building deeper relationships with Austin & Marianne, it has her reflecting on the connections she has in her life wondering whether finding your people is something that, although takes risks (and vulnerability), can be rewarding in the end. As she goes to & from school, Marianne's house and finds herself bonding with Austin as they help her go through her musician-era memorabilia, as she breezes through a few fun months of forging new friendships - its still at times she wonders whether her avoidant nature will cause problems. I loved how despite Austin not always understanding her anxiety - he always made an effort to include her and get to know her, which leads to many new adventurous firsts for Eloise as she meets new people, even something as simple as getting tacos with a friend or being invited to a party - at times its a struggle for her to agree, but as she begins to developed complicated feelings for Austin, she also relishes in how effortless it is when she finds her place among new people! From Olivie Blake, the New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six, comes a literary, intimate study of time, space, and the nature of love. Alone with You in the Ether explores what it means to be unwell, and how to face the fractures of yourself and still love as if you're not broken. I enjoyed this so much!! I loved the characters. I loved how Eloise, Austin and Marianne were each in a situation where they didn’t have many (if any) friends, and yet they were all wonderful people (Austin especially lol), so it really took the stigma out of it. Sometimes that’s just the situation you find yourself in because you haven’t found your people and it’s not your fault, nor does it say anything bad about you.

As for Marianne, she’s an absolute icon and I loved her dearly. I’ll take no criticism of Marianne, please and thank you. I ended up enjoying this book but, man, was it a slow start. There isn’t much of an active driving force in this novel. It relies on the characters to keep you invested and…honestly? The characters were nothing special. Nothing about this book was particularly special or unique, really. Every aspect, from the romantic tropes to the themes explored and the character archetypes have been done many times before, and quite frankly, they’ve been done better. It was a good book, but it was hard to become invested.For some reason, she believed him. She was sure that he had all the information: perhaps his wife had had enough of his meanness; perhaps she had a lover; maybe she didn’t like the fact that he was the kind of man who cared about fashion. Vivian believed that he understood the facts, but that, still, he didn’t know. But that’s what everybody says, of course,” the man said. Vivian could hear the tension in his voice. He must have stood up at that point because as he continued his voice grew distant and full of air. “You must hear stupid, obvious things like that every day,” he said. “ ‘We have a lot of love to give.’ It’s probably meaningless to you. But what else can we say? We want a child. We have enough money to offer a child a good life, all the advantages. We’re decent people with decent values. But it feels like we’re paying the price for some biological glitch we have no control over.” In each story, discuss the character’s detachment from each other, and from themselves. Is this a defense mechanism, or a character trait? Which protagonist has the greatest sense of self, and why? Entering into her senior year, Eloise has one goal in sight which is to get into USC. The only problem is that according to her guidance counselor, Eloise needs to put in some community service to make her application stand out. Her counselor suggests Lifecare as a great place to earn the time and seeing no other option, Eloise agrees. However, she isn't the best at talking to people and prefers to keep to herself so the outcome doesn't look promising.