Thank you for including Cake Time in your book club!
Please do get in touch if you’d like me to visit your book club in person.
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1. Cake Time is set mostly in Los Angeles, a land of freeways, palm trees, cultural diversity, socioeconomic inequities, and Hollywood dreams. How important is the city to the narrative? How does it define these characters?
2. The protagonists are constantly searching for connections, whether at a swingers party or in a coffee house. What compels these characters to continue their search for intimacy?
3. Cake Time follows a female protagonist who forges her own path — but makes a lot of mistakes in the process. Do you feel Cake Time is a book of female empowerment — or of failure?
4. We see many kinds of voyeurism in the novel. Relatedly, the main character often seems to be watching her life from outside the self, like it’s a theatrical performance. Is this a sensation you can relate to? Is this a tendency more common to women or men? Do you think this tendency is exacerbated in contemporary times — with social media and other technologies — or is this an age-old human habit that simply continues on today?
5. In Cake Time, the main character starts as a teenager in the first story and ends up as a single woman in her thirties by the last. Does she, in the end, grow up? Is this book a coming-of-age narrative — or a parody of one?
6. Many men come in and out of Cake Time‘s stories — men of different ages, ambitions, proclivities. Do these men have commonalities as well as differences? Does the portrayal of the men reveal some truths about men, or instead some truths about how women perceive men?
7. Cake Time is structured as a series of interconnected stories. How did this episodic format affect your reading of the book?