The following essay appeared in Self magazine in September 1997

Moments in Bonding: Reading Together
By Robin Marantz Henig

Oprah Winfrey has nothing on me. The talk show host is now widely regarded as the Goddess of Book Clubs. Witness the stratospheric sales figures for many of the books she discusses at her on-air reading group. While she admittedly does have a really big book club, Oprah still has only one. I have three.

I have three because there are three members in my family. My 17-year-old daughter and I are in an intergenerational women’s book club; my 13-year-old and I are in a mother-daughter book club; my husband and I are in a couples book club.

Our shared book clubs are my most reliable links to the hearts and minds of my daughters, who are in the adolescent throes of growing up and growing away. And the reading group to which my husband and I belong is our reemerging link to each other, since our other attempts at adult conversation often get lost in the swirl of running our household, chasing our careers and parenting our girls. For each of my loved ones, reading the same book and then talking about it in a group helps us weave a coruscating thread of words and feelings that’s all the more real for being grounded in fiction.

Other professional women of my generation join book clubs the way our mothers played bridge or canasta, or the way our older sisters joined consciousness-raising groups – to make a connection with other women. That’s why I joined book clubs, too, when I was in my twenties and thirties; but at age 43, I feel less of a need to connect to my friends than to re-connect to my little nuclear family. Book clubs were my attempt, once formal Friday night dinners proved infeasible (they interfered with soccer practice and dating and our theater subscription), to shepherd everyone back into the fold.

The first family book club I started was with my younger daughter. When Samantha was in fifth grade and an enthusiastic if scattershot reader, I read a newspaper article about mother-daughter book clubs, and Sam was eager to try it. She found three other avid readers, girls whose mothers loved reading too (and whom I also liked – an important and difficult-to-meet criterion), and the group was formed.

Like the group in the article, ours meets on Sunday evenings at six, rotating at members’ homes. After an hour of book talk, we order in pizza. Over the past two years, we have added one more mother-daughter pair, and we five mothers have had an education in the world of young adult books. These books present issues in stark terms and almost always hand you a moral by the final chapter, but they have led to animated discussions of child abuse, peer pressure, mental retardation (all raised in a single book, Risks ‘n Roses by Jan Slepian), depression (Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes by Chris Crutcher), and conformity (the subtext of just about every book we’ve read). We have recently snuck in some "real" books as well, such as Flowers for Algernon, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and The Catcher in the Rye.

We mothers have also learned the fine art of communicating with – in other words, listening to – our daughters. That is probably the best thing about this group. As our girls plunge into the rough waters ahead, if we can keep talking to each other about books, then at least we will still be talking.

My older daughter, Jessica, had wanted to join a book club with me even before Sam and I formed ours. A strictly mother-daughter group did not seem quite right for us, and the all-women’s group I belonged to at the time didn’t want to admit a teenager. So Jess and I formed our own intergenerational book club: three adults (me and two of my more open-minded friends), three teenagers (Jess and two of hers) and a medical student we met at a bookstore.

Every six weeks or so, our ragtag group gathers in my living room to attack a book from our wildly different viewpoints. The value of our cross-generational book talk was clear at our very first meeting nearly two years ago. Jess’ friend Rebecca had a theory about why the narrative of The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields changed from first person to third. As the narrator got older, Rebecca said, she gradually turned into other people’s expectations of her, rather than the simple, pure self she’d been in chapter one. This was an insight we adult members, so accustomed to being someone’s mother or wife or friend that the loss of an unfettered self seemed as natural as breathing, could not have seen without a teenager showing it to us.

After book talk we always move to my round, comfortable dining room table for coffee and dessert. The only rule in our assemblage, which has read books ranging from the sci-fi classic Dune by Frank Herbert to the rather esoteric Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson, is that at least something on the table must be chocolate.

The last to join my book club collection was my husband, Jeff. The prospect of a coed book group made me nervous initially; Jeff, like most other men I know, considers reading a private act. After our first meeting last fall, I was sure the group would never click. There we sat talking about an intensely personal book – Therapy by David Lodge – with about as much emotion as we would bring to a newspaper article about the Clinton administration.

How could a roomful of five long-married couples talk so dispassionately about a book describing midlife crisis, infidelity, regret, existentialism, depression, redemption? No doubt most of us have wrestled with at least a few of these demons in our own lives. Why was nobody saying anything personal? I decided it was because half the people in the room were men.

Our meetings eventually leavened, and now I look forward to my coed book club meetings with as much enthusiasm as I do the other two. There are few of the recollections, complaints and revelations that often flow from the all-female gatherings, but we in the coed group give each other something even more satisfying: a way to understand bits of a book we could never have figured out alone. There’s always an "Aha!" moment as we discuss Independence Day by Richard Ford or Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières. We are all part of the exhilarating collective process of thinking out loud.

So I cherish these three groups, each in its own way, for the dimension they add to my understanding of books – and, even more important, for the dimension they add to my understanding of the three most important people in my life.