Stuff
Product Details
Simon & Schuster, September 2009
Hardcover, 272 pages
ISBN-10: 1416576525
ISBN-13: 9781416576525
This reading group guide for Water Giver includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Joan Ryan. 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
INTRODUCTION
Joan Ryan expected motherhood to be different. She expected to raise her child just as she’d been raised. However, her son Ryan’s severe tantrums at home and trouble learning at school make her exceedingly frustrated by her inability to help him. Then, a severe accident and unlikely recovery brings mother and son closer than they’ve ever been. In a memoir about loving your child for who they are, not for whom you imagined them to be, Joan tells the story of the frightening path life took so that she could be the mother her son needed. With loyal friends and family, and the author’s deeply honest analysis of the events and most importantly herself, The Water Giver is a testament to love, acceptance and motherhood.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. When Ryan calls Joan “the water giver,” she says: “I let the words wash over me. They felt like absolution” (p. 148). How is this scene a symbol of the simplicity she’d been searching for between mother and son? Contrast this to the “heaping piles of paper,” which chronicle Ryan’s behavioral troubles, and as the Joan asserts, blunted her anxiety (p. 5).
2. From Dr. Doom and Clemania to Lorna, Scott and Eastham, talk about the major characters in the book. What insight did they provide for Joan about Ryan, and about herself? What do we learn about Joan from her depiction of her close friends and family?
3. How does Joan approach her family’s story and her own story of motherhood? What is the overall tone of the memoir? How does that affect your reading of the story?
4. Talk about Ryan’s epilogue. How did it feel to read Ryan’s first person account? Did that have any effect on the story? Did it feel celebratory to see how far he’d come?
5. The hospitals and treatment centers are central to the book’s sense of place. How the hospital scenes impact your reading experience? Whose trauma did it make more visceral, Ryan’s or Joan and Barry’s?
6. Joan’s identity is heavily oriented around her profession as a reporter and a journalist. Talk about the moments when she uses her reporter’s sense to cope with the changes in her family. What about her profession seemed to help prepare her for the challenges her family faced?
8. How does Joan’s profession affect the tone of the book? The structure?
9. Although clearly accepted and loved as a member the family, in what ways do you think the book would have been different if Ryan had been Joan’s biological child? Would that have increased her anxiety about the history of depression in her family? Do you think she would have been more critical of her mothering skills?
10. Compare and contrast Joan’s brother Bobby’s story to Ryan’s. Was she right to fear the similarities of Ryan and Bobby’s experiences? Were her fears largely superfluous?
11. The author seamlessly weaves her past personal narrative into her present circumstances. What did you think about the narrative shifts? How did they enhance your reading experience? Did knowing about Joan’s past help you better understand her relationship to her son?
12. Acceptance, transformation, and letting go of control are important themes in the memoir. Discuss how characters deal with each differently. Can you recall similar struggles of acceptance and transformation in your own experience?
13. Has the novel changed or impacted your perception of what “mothering” means? If so how?
14. The act of loving is an important theme in this novel. By the end of the book, how has the author learned to love differently?
ENHANCE YOUR BOOK CLUB
1. Start a blog. Chronicle your own transformative experience using Wordpress.com.
2. Want Joan Ryan to attend a book discussion? Log on to her website at http://www.joanryanink.com
A CONVERSATION WITH JOAN RYAN
Was writing this story essentially reliving the past? Was this a helpful exercise for you? For your family? Are there parts about the process you wish you could change?
Writing the book didn’t feel like reliving the past as much as it did re-examining it. We all have haunting moments tucked away somewhere secret. Some incidents that I felt a lot of shameabout – not hugging Ryan when he wandered over to a neighbor’s house, catching his fly ball at the family reunion – became less shameful once I confessed them on the page. The book allowed me to look at them objectively, let them go, and forgive myself.
Writing a memoir is always problematic for both the writer and the people the writer includes in the book. My husband read almost every draft and signed off on everything. I also asked my brothers and sisters to read the parts about them and my parents. I would have tossed out anything they found objectionable or inaccurate, but they were fine with what they read. In fact, one of my brothers said he learned a lot from the book, bits of family history that he had never known – such as the circumstances of our grandfather’s suicide.
You write, “The brain, I know, cannot be trusted with the past. It skips pages, whole chapters. It rewrites.” You admit that you are “putting forth a picture that is incomplete and skewed.” Why was this proclamation so important for readers to have in the beginning?
I wanted to be clear that the account of my motherhood and my son’s childhood was through my eyes only. It was my truth, not my husband’s or Ryan’s. I recognized that, during Ryan’s childhood, I dwelled way too much on my failings and Ryan’s deficits. I wanted the reader to know I was not a completely reliable narrator, that I was not presenting the most balanced account of those years. But understanding my perception of those years is crucial to understanding the impact Ryan’s accident had on me. The reader can’t understand how fundamentally I changed as a mother without first knowing that my motherhood up until that point was about fixing flaws – in both me and my son – instead of celebrating strengths.
You’re extremely hard on yourself, which, based on the text, could be a result of your experiences breaking into sports as female journalist. Is it safe to say that those same “incomplete and skewed” memories indicate a mother who wasn’t as bad as you’d once believed?
My own depression and unrealistic expectations colored my perception. Was I as incompetent a mother as I thought I was? My husband doesn’t think so and Ryan doesn’t think so, which means perhaps my assessment isn’t accurate.. All of us look back at the past through our own filters. My experience as a sports columnist was one of those filters. I had very high expectations of myself. I truly thought I could accomplish anything with enough hard work and research and courage. Then Ryan was born – and I simply was out of my league. All those insecurities from childhood that I thought I had mastered flooded back and I had no compassion for my own ineptness. I just worked harder and beat myself up even more.
Did you find a contradiction in believing “in a magic that would make Ryan whole,” yet no longer having faith in a God-like figure (p.106)?
Absolutely it was a contradiction. It made no sense. But there it was. I have grappled with faith for much of my life – trying to define it, trying to reconcile it with science and logic. But in that moment when my son was holding on to life, I knew my belief in his recovery had to be stronger than his injury. Is that prayer? Is it energy? I still don’t know. I just know I felt something beyond technology and medical expertise was helping my son. Perhaps this is a good definition of denial. Perhaps when reality is too much to bear our brains turn to magic and faith because they require no evidence. We can just believe and feel soothed.
Was including a chapter by Ryan always part of the plan? How did that come about? Did you want to do that for your readers—to satiate their need for Ryan’s recovery? Or was it simply important to the family?
I always planned to include an afterword by Ryan. I kept a blog during Ryan’s hospitalization so friends and family could keep abreast of his condition every day. Every night when Barry and I returned from the hospital, I would write a new entry then check all the comments people had left for us that day. This was always one of my favorite parts of the day. I felt so loved and supported knowing how many people were thinking of us and sending good thoughts to Ryan. When Ryan returned home and I stopped writing the blog, I asked Ryan to write the final entry. He thanked everyone and said he was doing great and still working hard at his recovery. People told me afterward how powerful it was to hear from Ryan himself. I figured readers of the book might respond similarly. Also, I know some readers might be concerned that I was invading Ryan’s privacy or that he might not approve of the book. His afterword makes clear that he endorsed the project.
Since hindsight is 20/20, how much of the insight throughout the book was revelatory during the writing process and how much of it were things that you remembered experiencing?
I remember sitting in the waiting rooms of Marin General and UCSF and observing my own behavior with a sense of admiration. I don’t say this to pat myself on the back. It was a strange sensation to be kind of outside of yourself and thinking, “Wow, look at you. You’re so serene, so full of hope, so willing to give yourself over to the situation rather than trying to control it.’’ I didn’t spend a lot of time analyzing this shift in perspective until I started writing. I think the writing process helped me to articulate how I had changed and why. Writing about the experience allowed me to chart, in some ways, where I came from and how I finally reached the place I always hoped to reach. I finally had become the kind of mother I envisioned I would be and was able to love my son without reservation or judgment.
You describe the doctor’s description of Ryan’s recovery as “the tumble of it,” “the changeability of it,” risibly juxtaposing that with “you don’t need to go to a monastery in Tibet to learn about living in the moment. Just spend a month in an ICU” (p. 130). These statements hint at your pragmatism, but also that you link personal growth to unexpected tragedies. Is this something you’ve always believed?
I’ve always known that awful things deepen your understanding of others and yourself. Growing up with a brother with all kinds of psychological and physical problems shaped me and my brothers and sisters. We are so different from one another but one thing we have in common is compassion. We are all champions of the underdog. We know what it’s like to be picked on and dismissed; we watched our brother suffer through it every day. I am not a proponent of the adage that suffering builds character – I’d rather suffer less and build character in other ways, thank you – but there often are gifts that come out of tragedies. And the best gift, as I know, is that you learn something that makes you a more loving human being.
You mention four different instances of unexpected suicides. Were you aware of the prevalence of these types of stories in the narrative? In your personal narrative?
I hadn’t realized, frankly, there are four suicides in the book. I have often thought about the suicides in my own family – my grandfather and uncle. I have wondered if there is a genetic component. Is my father at risk? Am I? When our neighbor, the mother with four children, jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge, I tried to imagine the world inside her head. What is the path from cupcakes on Teacher Appreciation Day to leaping to one’s death? It scares me to think that someone who seems so normal could, under certain circumstances, sink into such darkness. I think this is a topic I have not finished exploring.
Were you, or your immediate circle of friends and family, surprised at the development of any of the major themes? Were you sure of anything besides the subject matter while writing?
I knew when I began the book that the major theme was motherhood. I knew it was about learning to raise, and celebrate, the child you have, not the child you thought you would have. What I didn’t know, almost until the end of the book, was that this didn’t go far enough. The most important lesson of parenthood is to recognize that your child is exactly the person he is supposed to be. And that, if you’re lucky, he just might be the teacher who shapes you into the person you are supposed to be.
Although you’ve had time to imbibe the information, how daunting was the medical terminology initially? Was it difficult to process while you were experiencing the trauma? How about during the writing process?
While Ryan was in the hospital, I stayed away from the internet and other resources. I had no desire to analyze everything that was going on. That part of my brain seemed to turn off on its own. I let the doctors do their jobs (at least for the most part; I did ask a lot of questions, of course). When I began to write the book, I went into full reporter mode. I ordered all of Ryan’s hospital records and interviewed all of Ryan’s primary doctors. The terminology really wasn’t daunting because, as a journalist, I was always wading into unfamiliar territory with unfamiliar language. I also knew I would have all the doctors read the manuscript to make sure I had gotten all the procedures and medications correct.
Referring to Ryan you write, “It seemed almost unbelievable that I had forgotten how intensely I loved him” (p. 95). Was this difficult to admit? Were there parts of this story that were difficult for you to write about?
This was the most difficult revelation. I truly didn’t realize how long it had been since I gave myself over completely to loving Ryan. I think it was part of my nature to hold something back in every relationship, to not let myself become too vulnerable. Where does that come from? I don’t know. But self-sufficiency and independence had always been so integral to my self-image. I never recognized, until I wrote the book and did the excruciating work of examining myself, that they applied to my relationship with my son.
INTRODUCTION
Joan Ryan expected motherhood to be different. She expected to raise her child just as she’d been raised. However, her son Ryan’s severe tantrums at home and trouble learning at school make her exceedingly frustrated by her inability to help him. Then, a severe accident and unlikely recovery brings mother and son closer than they’ve ever been. In a memoir about loving your child for who they are, not for whom you imagined them to be, Joan tells the story of the frightening path life took so that she could be the mother her son needed. With loyal friends and family, and the author’s deeply honest analysis of the events and most importantly herself, The Water Giver is a testament to love, acceptance and motherhood.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. When Ryan calls Joan “the water giver,” she says: “I let the words wash over me. They felt like absolution” (p. 148). How is this scene a symbol of the simplicity she’d been searching for between mother and son? Contrast this to the “heaping piles of paper,” which chronicle Ryan’s behavioral troubles, and as the Joan asserts, blunted her anxiety (p. 5).
2. From Dr. Doom and Clemania to Lorna, Scott and Eastham, talk about the major characters in the book. What insight did they provide for Joan about Ryan, and about herself? What do we learn about Joan from her depiction of her close friends and family?
3. How does Joan approach her family’s story and her own story of motherhood? What is the overall tone of the memoir? How does that affect your reading of the story?
4. Talk about Ryan’s epilogue. How did it feel to read Ryan’s first person account? Did that have any effect on the story? Did it feel celebratory to see how far he’d come?
5. The hospitals and treatment centers are central to the book’s sense of place. How the hospital scenes impact your reading experience? Whose trauma did it make more visceral, Ryan’s or Joan and Barry’s?
6. Joan’s identity is heavily oriented around her profession as a reporter and a journalist. Talk about the moments when she uses her reporter’s sense to cope with the changes in her family. What about her profession seemed to help prepare her for the challenges her family faced?
8. How does Joan’s profession affect the tone of the book? The structure?
9. Although clearly accepted and loved as a member the family, in what ways do you think the book would have been different if Ryan had been Joan’s biological child? Would that have increased her anxiety about the history of depression in her family? Do you think she would have been more critical of her mothering skills?
10. Compare and contrast Joan’s brother Bobby’s story to Ryan’s. Was she right to fear the similarities of Ryan and Bobby’s experiences? Were her fears largely superfluous?
11. The author seamlessly weaves her past personal narrative into her present circumstances. What did you think about the narrative shifts? How did they enhance your reading experience? Did knowing about Joan’s past help you better understand her relationship to her son?
12. Acceptance, transformation, and letting go of control are important themes in the memoir. Discuss how characters deal with each differently. Can you recall similar struggles of acceptance and transformation in your own experience?
13. Has the novel changed or impacted your perception of what “mothering” means? If so how?
14. The act of loving is an important theme in this novel. By the end of the book, how has the author learned to love differently?
ENHANCE YOUR BOOK CLUB
1. Start a blog. Chronicle your own transformative experience using Wordpress.com.
2. Want Joan Ryan to attend a book discussion? Log on to her website at http://www.joanryanink.com
A CONVERSATION WITH JOAN RYAN
Was writing this story essentially reliving the past? Was this a helpful exercise for you? For your family? Are there parts about the process you wish you could change?
Writing the book didn’t feel like reliving the past as much as it did re-examining it. We all have haunting moments tucked away somewhere secret. Some incidents that I felt a lot of shameabout – not hugging Ryan when he wandered over to a neighbor’s house, catching his fly ball at the family reunion – became less shameful once I confessed them on the page. The book allowed me to look at them objectively, let them go, and forgive myself.
Writing a memoir is always problematic for both the writer and the people the writer includes in the book. My husband read almost every draft and signed off on everything. I also asked my brothers and sisters to read the parts about them and my parents. I would have tossed out anything they found objectionable or inaccurate, but they were fine with what they read. In fact, one of my brothers said he learned a lot from the book, bits of family history that he had never known – such as the circumstances of our grandfather’s suicide.
You write, “The brain, I know, cannot be trusted with the past. It skips pages, whole chapters. It rewrites.” You admit that you are “putting forth a picture that is incomplete and skewed.” Why was this proclamation so important for readers to have in the beginning?
I wanted to be clear that the account of my motherhood and my son’s childhood was through my eyes only. It was my truth, not my husband’s or Ryan’s. I recognized that, during Ryan’s childhood, I dwelled way too much on my failings and Ryan’s deficits. I wanted the reader to know I was not a completely reliable narrator, that I was not presenting the most balanced account of those years. But understanding my perception of those years is crucial to understanding the impact Ryan’s accident had on me. The reader can’t understand how fundamentally I changed as a mother without first knowing that my motherhood up until that point was about fixing flaws – in both me and my son – instead of celebrating strengths.
You’re extremely hard on yourself, which, based on the text, could be a result of your experiences breaking into sports as female journalist. Is it safe to say that those same “incomplete and skewed” memories indicate a mother who wasn’t as bad as you’d once believed?
My own depression and unrealistic expectations colored my perception. Was I as incompetent a mother as I thought I was? My husband doesn’t think so and Ryan doesn’t think so, which means perhaps my assessment isn’t accurate.. All of us look back at the past through our own filters. My experience as a sports columnist was one of those filters. I had very high expectations of myself. I truly thought I could accomplish anything with enough hard work and research and courage. Then Ryan was born – and I simply was out of my league. All those insecurities from childhood that I thought I had mastered flooded back and I had no compassion for my own ineptness. I just worked harder and beat myself up even more.
Did you find a contradiction in believing “in a magic that would make Ryan whole,” yet no longer having faith in a God-like figure (p.106)?
Absolutely it was a contradiction. It made no sense. But there it was. I have grappled with faith for much of my life – trying to define it, trying to reconcile it with science and logic. But in that moment when my son was holding on to life, I knew my belief in his recovery had to be stronger than his injury. Is that prayer? Is it energy? I still don’t know. I just know I felt something beyond technology and medical expertise was helping my son. Perhaps this is a good definition of denial. Perhaps when reality is too much to bear our brains turn to magic and faith because they require no evidence. We can just believe and feel soothed.
Was including a chapter by Ryan always part of the plan? How did that come about? Did you want to do that for your readers—to satiate their need for Ryan’s recovery? Or was it simply important to the family?
I always planned to include an afterword by Ryan. I kept a blog during Ryan’s hospitalization so friends and family could keep abreast of his condition every day. Every night when Barry and I returned from the hospital, I would write a new entry then check all the comments people had left for us that day. This was always one of my favorite parts of the day. I felt so loved and supported knowing how many people were thinking of us and sending good thoughts to Ryan. When Ryan returned home and I stopped writing the blog, I asked Ryan to write the final entry. He thanked everyone and said he was doing great and still working hard at his recovery. People told me afterward how powerful it was to hear from Ryan himself. I figured readers of the book might respond similarly. Also, I know some readers might be concerned that I was invading Ryan’s privacy or that he might not approve of the book. His afterword makes clear that he endorsed the project.
Since hindsight is 20/20, how much of the insight throughout the book was revelatory during the writing process and how much of it were things that you remembered experiencing?
I remember sitting in the waiting rooms of Marin General and UCSF and observing my own behavior with a sense of admiration. I don’t say this to pat myself on the back. It was a strange sensation to be kind of outside of yourself and thinking, “Wow, look at you. You’re so serene, so full of hope, so willing to give yourself over to the situation rather than trying to control it.’’ I didn’t spend a lot of time analyzing this shift in perspective until I started writing. I think the writing process helped me to articulate how I had changed and why. Writing about the experience allowed me to chart, in some ways, where I came from and how I finally reached the place I always hoped to reach. I finally had become the kind of mother I envisioned I would be and was able to love my son without reservation or judgment.
You describe the doctor’s description of Ryan’s recovery as “the tumble of it,” “the changeability of it,” risibly juxtaposing that with “you don’t need to go to a monastery in Tibet to learn about living in the moment. Just spend a month in an ICU” (p. 130). These statements hint at your pragmatism, but also that you link personal growth to unexpected tragedies. Is this something you’ve always believed?
I’ve always known that awful things deepen your understanding of others and yourself. Growing up with a brother with all kinds of psychological and physical problems shaped me and my brothers and sisters. We are so different from one another but one thing we have in common is compassion. We are all champions of the underdog. We know what it’s like to be picked on and dismissed; we watched our brother suffer through it every day. I am not a proponent of the adage that suffering builds character – I’d rather suffer less and build character in other ways, thank you – but there often are gifts that come out of tragedies. And the best gift, as I know, is that you learn something that makes you a more loving human being.
You mention four different instances of unexpected suicides. Were you aware of the prevalence of these types of stories in the narrative? In your personal narrative?
I hadn’t realized, frankly, there are four suicides in the book. I have often thought about the suicides in my own family – my grandfather and uncle. I have wondered if there is a genetic component. Is my father at risk? Am I? When our neighbor, the mother with four children, jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge, I tried to imagine the world inside her head. What is the path from cupcakes on Teacher Appreciation Day to leaping to one’s death? It scares me to think that someone who seems so normal could, under certain circumstances, sink into such darkness. I think this is a topic I have not finished exploring.
Were you, or your immediate circle of friends and family, surprised at the development of any of the major themes? Were you sure of anything besides the subject matter while writing?
I knew when I began the book that the major theme was motherhood. I knew it was about learning to raise, and celebrate, the child you have, not the child you thought you would have. What I didn’t know, almost until the end of the book, was that this didn’t go far enough. The most important lesson of parenthood is to recognize that your child is exactly the person he is supposed to be. And that, if you’re lucky, he just might be the teacher who shapes you into the person you are supposed to be.
Although you’ve had time to imbibe the information, how daunting was the medical terminology initially? Was it difficult to process while you were experiencing the trauma? How about during the writing process?
While Ryan was in the hospital, I stayed away from the internet and other resources. I had no desire to analyze everything that was going on. That part of my brain seemed to turn off on its own. I let the doctors do their jobs (at least for the most part; I did ask a lot of questions, of course). When I began to write the book, I went into full reporter mode. I ordered all of Ryan’s hospital records and interviewed all of Ryan’s primary doctors. The terminology really wasn’t daunting because, as a journalist, I was always wading into unfamiliar territory with unfamiliar language. I also knew I would have all the doctors read the manuscript to make sure I had gotten all the procedures and medications correct.
Referring to Ryan you write, “It seemed almost unbelievable that I had forgotten how intensely I loved him” (p. 95). Was this difficult to admit? Were there parts of this story that were difficult for you to write about?
This was the most difficult revelation. I truly didn’t realize how long it had been since I gave myself over completely to loving Ryan. I think it was part of my nature to hold something back in every relationship, to not let myself become too vulnerable. Where does that come from? I don’t know. But self-sufficiency and independence had always been so integral to my self-image. I never recognized, until I wrote the book and did the excruciating work of examining myself, that they applied to my relationship with my son.
