READERS GUIDE

Questions and Topics for Discussion

1. Speech Team finds its cast of characters reaching back from the year 2012 to their ’80s high school experience, after the suicide of one of their high school friends. This return to the past in search of resolution has profound and unpredictable consequences on the characters, and their relationships with one another. What does this novel have to say about the search for emotional resolution?

2. Speech Team spans several decades, tracing the societal and political shifts that took place from the ’80s to the early 2010s, and their impact on the characters’ sense of self and views of one another. How do each character’s choices, perspectives, and emotions embody this shift?

3. Race and class figure quite prominently in Speech Team and affect both the characters themselves and the relationships among them. What does this evoke for you, and what does it make you think about with regards to your own life, or the lives of those you love?

4. A central tension within Speech Team is the friction between the present and the negative, painful memories of the past. With Tip as the first-person narrator, we get a sense of how this tension plays out within him. How does it shape his life and his relationship to himself?

5. Consider the relationship between Anthony and Tip throughout the years, both as friends and as occasional lovers. What do you think their respective material conditions, aspirations, and relationships to themselves convey? What do you think draws them to each other and keeps them apart?

6. Tip is the only character from whom we get to see the internal experience of the lingering pain and shame inflicted by Gold. What do you make of Tip’s lashing out during the denouement of the book, his merciless comparison of himself with his friends, and his spiral back into alcohol abuse?

7. How do you think Tip’s narrative point of view is used in the book? How does he (or doesn’t he) let us into the other characters’ perspectives, and what does this tell you about his own?

8. Jennifer observes that “whatever our sore thumb factor was, [Gold] found it.” Consider Gold’s motivation and the position of power he held over the characters as high school students. How do Jennifer’s statement and Gold’s position of power affect your perspective on his actions?

9. How does Gold’s condition, and the characters’ indelible memories of what he did to them, affect what the book has to say about the nature of memory and the ways it can shape a life?

10. Has anyone ever said something to you in the vein of what Gold says to his students, something that has stuck with you your whole life? How did it affect you? Do you recall saying anything that may have had a similar effect on others?

11. Time is a major theme in the book (after all, it spans nearly thirty years). How is the passage of time used in the book, and to what effect?