Our first BLR Book Club pick is FIRE EXIT, a novel by Morgan Talty. Named a Best Book of the Year by TIME, The New Yorker, ELLE, NPR, and Harper’s Bazaar, Fire Exit is available on BLR’s Bookshop page, where a portion of every purchase goes to supporting our programming.
About Fire Exit
From the award-winning author Morgan Talty, comes a masterful and unforgettable story of family, legacy, bloodlines, culture and inheritance, and what, if anything, we owe one another.
From the porch of his home, Charles Lamosway has watched the life he might have had unfold across the river on Maine’s Penobscot Reservation. He caught brief moments of his neighbor Elizabeth’s life―from the day she came home from the hospital to her early twenties. But there’s something deeper and more dangerous than the river that divides him from her and the rest of the tribal community. It’s the secret that Elizabeth is his daughter, a secret Charles is no longer willing to keep.
Every week, we will be discussing a section of the book; follow along and learn more by visiting our BLR Book Club page, where weekly posts will live.
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Note: All pagination is based on the paperback version.
Week 4: Chapters 11-14
As Charles cares for Louise, he develops overwhelming anxiety (“like I’d known somehow I was going to be frightened by it even though it had yet to happen”). He is visited by his childhood friend Gizos and observes, with worry, Elizabeth moving back into her parents’ house.
- Gizos wants to find his birth mother. He asks Charles, “Have you thought to look for your [birth] father?” but Charles says no. Why isn’t he interested?
- Gizos and his husband have adopted a Native boy whose parentage lies outside each of their tribes. He worries about his son’s culture becoming inaccessible: “He can’t be Lakota or Penobscot. He can only be what he is, and he’ll always be there…That’s his blood” (118). Why does he say, “This is such an Indian thing to worry about?
- Charles isn’t Native, but he nevertheless understands Gizos’ meaning: “…I know and still know what it was like to both not belong and belong, what it was like to feel invisible inside the great, great dream of being. We’re all alike, even when we’re not” (118).
Join us on the BLR Book Club Facebook Group to discuss Fire Exit, and visit our BLR Book Club page to read all the commentary.