Falling Together
Marisa de los Santos, 2011
HarperCollins
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061670886
Summary
What if saying hello to an old friend meant saying good-bye to life as you know it?
It’s been six years since Pen Calloway watched her best friends walk out of her life. And through the birth of her daughter, the death of her father, and the vicissitudes of single motherhood, she has never stopped missing them.
Pen, Cat, and Will met on their first day of college and formed what seemed like a lifelong bond, only to break apart amid the realities of adulthood. When, after six years of silence, Cat—the bewitching center of their group—emails Pen and Will asking to meet at their college reunion, they can’t refuse. But instead of a happy reconciliation, what awaits is a collision of past and present that sends Pen and Will on a journey across the world.
With her trademark wit, vivid prose, and gift for creating captivating characters, Marisa de los Santos returns with an emotionally resonant novel about our deepest human con-nections. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 12, 1966
• Where—Baltimore, Maryland, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Virginia; M.F.A., Sarah Lawrence College; Ph.D., University
of Houston
• Currently—lives in Wilmington, Delaware
Marisa de los Santos achieved her earliest success as an award-winning poet, and her work has been published in several literary journals. In 2000, her debut collection, From the Bones Out, appeared as part of the James Dickey Contemporary Poetry Series.
De los Santos made her first foray into fiction in 2005 with the surprise bestseller Love Walked In. Optioned almost immediately for the movies, this elegant "literary romance" introduced Cornelia Brown, a diminutive, 30-something Philadelphian with a passion for classic film and an unshakable belief in the triumph of true love.
In her 2008 sequel, Belong to Me, de los Santos revisited Cornelia, now a married woman, newly relocated to the suburbs, and struggling to forge friendships with the women in her new hometown.
Her third novel, Falling Together, released in 2011, recounts the reunion of three college friends, whose friendships dissolve as everything they believed about themselves and each other is brought into question.
The Precious One, published in 2015, follows the two half-sisters who meet for the first time as they struggle to please their narcissistic, domineering father.
Extras
From a 2008 Barnes & Noble interview:
• De los Santos' love affair with books began at a young age. She claims to have risked life and limb as a child by insisting on combining reading with such incompatible activities as skating, turning cartwheels, and descending stairs.
• I'm addicted to ballet, completely head-over-heels for it. I did it as a little kid, but took about a thirty year hiatus before starting adult classes. I do it as many times a week as I can, but if I could, I'd do it every day! In my next life, I'm definitely going to be a ballerina.
• I'm terrible with plants, outdoor plants, indoor plants, annuals, perennials. I kill them off in record time. I adore fresh flowers and keep them all over my house all year round because they're beautiful and already dead, but you won't find a single potted plant in my house. So many nice people in the world and in books are growers and gardeners, but the sad truth is that I'll never be one of them.
• I'm an awful sleeper, and the thing that helps me fall asleep or fall back to sleep is reading books from my childhood. Elizabeth Enright's Melendy series and her two Gone Away Lake books, all of the Anne of Green Gables books, Little Women, The Secret Garden, the Narnia books, and a bunch of others. I have probably read some of these books twenty, maybe thirty times. I read them to pieces, literally, and then have to buy new ones.
• I am crazy-scared of sharks and almost never swim in the ocean. Yes, I know it's silly, I know my chances of getting bitten by a shark are about the same as my chances of becoming president of the United States, but I can't help it.
• My favorite way to spend an evening is eating a meal with good friends. The cheese plate, the red wine, the clink of forks, a passel of kids dancing to The Jonas Brothers and laughing their heads off in the next room, food that either I or someone else has cooked with care and love, and warm, lively conversation-give me all this and I'm happy as a clam.
• I adore black and white movies, particularly romantic comedies from the thirties and forties. I love them for the dialogue and for the whip smart, fascinating, fast-talking, funny women.
• When asked what book that most influenced her career as a writer, here is her response:
I read To Kill a Mockingbird when I was ten, I can't count how many times I've read it since, and every single time, I am utterly pulled in. I don't read it; I live it. I'm with Scout on Boo Radley's porch and in the colored courtroom balcony, and my heart breaks with hers at Tom Robinson's fate. Over and over, the book lifts me up and sets me down into her shoes. I remember the wonder I felt the first time it happened, the sudden, jarring illumination: every person is the center of his or her life the way I am the center of mine. It changed everything. I know that sounds dramatic, but it's true. That empathy is the greatest gift fiction gives us, and it's the biggest reason I write. (Author bio and interview adapted from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
A stimulating if baggy story of friendship, de los Santos's latest (after Belong to Me) tracks what happens to a trio of former friends brought together under unusual circumstances at their college reunion. Cat Ocampo's decision to marry Jason, her longtime boyfriend that her friends Will and Pen can't stand, drives a wedge into the friendship, and soon, with Cat out of the picture, Will and Pen drift apart. Six years later, Pen is a single mom and smarting from the loss of her father when, as the college reunion approaches, Cat e-mails her and Will, telling them she needs to see them at the reunion, but when Will and Pen show up, there's a big, unwelcome surprise waiting for them. De los Santos's fluid prose powers what turns into a nifty mystery, and though the plot flags later on, as if being drawn out for the sake of being drawn out, the mix of perfectly realized personalities and genuine emotion make this a winner.
Publishers Weekly
Pen, Will, and Cat become friends in college but have that inevitable falling out. Not so long after graduation, single-mom Pen gets a frantic email plea from Will, begging her to come to a class reunion. There, the three friends meet, greet, and go on a life-changing journey. Okay, you've heard the plot before, but books by de los Santos are big best sellers, and Belong to Mewon the American Library Association Reading List Award for Women's Fiction.
Library Journal
Falling Together explores the ways our familial relationships and friendships affect who we are and who we’re becoming…the appeal of de los Santos’ books remains the intimacy with which the reader gets to know each character.
BookPage
Brimming with the author’s trademark wit, vivid prose and captivating characterizations, Falling Together brilliantly explores our deepest human connections and confirms Marisa de los Santos as one of America’s most exciting contemporary novelists.
Bookreporter.com
[A] good, solid read that succeeds in being both funny and heartbreaking. De los Santos has a knack for best-friend banter and stays true to the emotions involved in letting go of treasured relationships..
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. Describe Pen, Will, and Cat. What were they like as students and how has time changed who they are? All three of them have serious issues involving their fathers. Talk about how their relationships shaped their lives and their outlooks. How did each cope with their emotional wounds? Did you like any one character more than another? Why?
2. What drew Pen, Will, and Calt together, and what was it about each of them that created their magical bond? Why did they lose touch? Would they have come together eventually? What is it like when they are finally united? Would you go across the world to find an old friend?
3. What makes friendships work between people? Why is it often difficult to sustain friendships as we get older? How can we sustain them? Is it sometimes better to let a friendship die? Why? Have you ever enjoyed a friendship as special as that of the trio in the book? How did it begin? How did it impact your life? Can a person live without close friends?
4. Why do Pen and Will decide to go to the reunion after they receive Cat’s email? What are they hoping for in attending? Can we turn back time and reunite in a fulfilling way or are the people we are today just too far removed from our past selves? How do they react to each other when they finally meet up?
5. When they meet at the reunion, Pen suggests they sum up the missing years in four sentences. Think about an old friend you haven’t been in contact with for a while. What would you say in four sentences to describe your life in the time that has passed? Try it with members of your reading group. Think about what has happened since your last meeting and express it in a few sentences.
6. Talk about Jason. What are your impressions of him? What about Pen? Will? Cat? Why did Cat marry him? Did your feelings about him change as you learned more about who he was and what happened to him? What do Pen and Will learn from being with him? What does he learn from them?
7. Pen tells Will about her mother’s homecoming after her father’s death, and her surprise at how happy her mother seems. “’She was in India and Tibet, right?’ he said. ‘Maybe she had some kind of spiritual awakening. Or maybe she’s just glad to be home.’ Will could see how a spiritual awakening and coming home to Pen and Augusta could amount to the same thing.” What do you think this means?
8. Pen has some interesting notions about love. She sees it as an “imperative.” How does this view color how she sees love in her own life and in the lives of those around her—Will, Cat, Jason, Patrick, her mom? Would you say she’s afraid of love?
9. Marisa de los Santos uses the image of falling in several ways throughout the novel. “There were people who could live on their own and be happy, and then there were people like Pen and Margaret who needed the falling together, the daily work of giving and taking and talk and touch.” Discuss this example of falling. Identify others in the novel and explore how they relate to the characters.
10. Love, friendship, family, commitment, parenthood, loss, grief are many of the themes the novel touches upon. Choose one or two and trace how they are explored and resolved through the course of the story in an individual character’s life.
11. When Pen, Will, and Jason meet Cat’s extended family in the Philippines, Pen is enchanted. “You like it here,” Will tells her. “It’s a Pen kind of place.” Why was Pen so taken by Cat’s family?
12. While looking for Cat, Pen has her “jack-fish epiphany.” Explain what insights she gleans, or as her colleague, Amelie describes it, “All is One and All is Different.” Have you ever had a similar kind of “knowing moment” and when did it happen?
13. What finally gives Pen and Will the courage to share their feelings? Why does it take so long? Do you think they will stay in touch with Jason? Will Pen and Will last?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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