The Amateur Book Club Questions
by Chris Bohjalian
These questions assume everyone has finished the book and contain spoilers, including the ending.
The Amateur gives a book club a lot to wrestle with: memory, guilt, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive. Mira's voice is confident and unsettling, so it is natural to ask how much you trust her. The novel also plays with cause and effect in ways that reward slow, careful conversation.
Use these questions as a starting point, not a checklist. They are grouped by big themes, but feel free to jump around and follow what the group finds most interesting. There are no wrong answers here. The goal is to share reactions and notice moments that might have passed you by on a first read.
Chance, Fate, and the Ending
- 1.The novel opens with the narrator saying 'It is chance that pulls the strings.' After the epilogue reveals Kenny cut the target down himself, does that ending support the theme of chance or undercut it?
- 2.The epilogue reveals Kenny wrote Mira a letter, signed 'Ken,' and quoted Machiavelli: 'Never was anything great achieved without danger.' How does that letter reframe the accident, the target, and Kenny's feelings for Mira?
- 3.Ethan tells Mira that Kenny's death was a 'freak accident' and urges her to stop punishing herself. Did the novel ultimately convince you that it was a freak accident, or does the epilogue make Kenny's death feel more like a deliberate, ironic consequence of his own act?
- 4.Sharon Foster tells Mira they are both 'cursed.' By the end of the book, after the criminal case is dismissed, the civil suit is settled, and Theo lies about having had other girls, did you see Mira as cursed, or as a survivor of bad luck and bad choices?
Mira, Truth, and Accountability
- 5.Did you agree with Mira's decision to go to Sharon Foster's house and apologize, especially after her mother warned her it could have legal implications?
- 6.How did your view of Mira change when she lied to her parents about Theo, claiming she was eighteen and that it happened only once, rather than telling them she was fifteen and the affair was ongoing?
- 7.Mira believes that killing Kenny Foster was her punishment for sleeping with a married man her parents' age. Do you think she actually believed that, or was it a way of making senseless tragedy feel like something she could explain?
- 8.Dennis destroys Mira's story, tells her she is not a writer, and says 'Then be a banker.' How did that moment shape her future as a writer, and did she ever really escape the pattern of older men like Dennis and Theo?
- 9.Did you agree with Mira's decision not to testify at her trial? Would you have trusted the jury with the truth about the target, or was it too risky?
Memory, Perspective, and Moral Complexity
- 10.When Mira visits Theo Catton in 2018 and asks if there were others after her, he says there could only be one her. Did you believe him, and what did you think of Mira answering 'Pedophilia' when he asked about her tattoo?
- 11.Olivia Foster stayed silent for decades about Kenny cutting down the target himself. Did you agree with her choice as a thirteen-year-old, and did her explanation at the Miami Book Festival change how you felt about her?
- 12.Mira's father brawls with Theo in the Cattons' driveway after learning about the affair, while Mira's mother defends her own affair with Sam Stetson by saying she can fuck whomever she pleases. What did you make of the Winstons' different moral standards?
- 13.The narrator repeatedly insists she is a 'very reliable narrator.' Did you trust her version of events, especially her account of the suicide attempt, her affair with Theo, and the discovery of the target in her golf bag?
- 14.Why do you think Mira could only watch Animal House in full at age forty-four? What does that movie, and the memory of Spencer talking about it, come to represent for her by the end of the novel?