For Book Clubs & Reading Groups
Reading Group Guide
Twelve discussion questions, a letter from the author, and a free video visit from A. Tony Mendoza for your book club.
From the author
A Letter to Your Book Club
Thank you for choosing In Our Secret Life.
I spent two years chasing Jerry and Rita across New Mexico and Arizona, and the thing I kept running into was how little the real case resembles a heist. No syndicate. No fence. No ransom, no trail. Two retired schoolteachers, a painting on a bedroom wall, and a marriage that kept its own counsel for thirty-two years.
Every reporter who covered it asked the same question, which was how. I got stuck on a different one. What is it like to be the only two people on earth who know a thing, for sixty years, and to be married to the one other person who knows it?
So I did not write the theft. I wrote the marriage.
If your group argues about whether Jerry and Rita are people you admire, I have done my job. I do not think the book answers that, and I did not want it to.
One more thing. If your club would like me to join your discussion, I would be glad to. I do it by video, it costs nothing, and it is the best part of having written this book. The link is below, and I answer every request myself.
A. Tony Mendoza
Discussion Questions
Spoiler alert: these questions discuss the whole novel, including the ending. Open them after everyone has finished the book.
- Jerry calls Rita the better thief. She spends sixty years making the world look past her; he spends his life wanting credit. What did each of them actually want from the work?
- The marriage begins with recognition rather than romance, two pickpockets who know their own kind on sight. Is this a love story, or a partnership that became one? Does the difference matter?
- Everything they take, they sell, except her. Why do you think they kept the painting? What did she give them that money could not?
- Twice someone nearly destroys her. Jerry with a fire, Rita with a knife. Both times the rage comes from the same place. What is it?
- Joey never asks. Brenda never asks. Jerry says the two silences are not the same silence. What is the difference, and which would be harder to live with?
- Rita tells the story backward, from her final days. How would the novel change if it ran forward? What does the structure let her keep from you until she is ready?
- Jerry writes his book as a letter to a printer who has been dead forty years, and he wants the record more than he wants to stay free. Is that vanity, grief, or something else?
- Rita’s greatest skill was being unmemorable, making people look past her. Then a disease takes her memory. Is there a cruelty in that, or a symmetry?
- Rita writes a note that reads DO NOT WRITE POST-IT NOTES ANYMORE, and laughs until it is not laughing anymore. What is she facing in that moment?
- They raised two children on money they stole. Does that change what they gave them?
- At the end Rita says they got away with everything. Do you believe her? What, if anything, did they not get away with?
- The novel is drawn from a real case in which no one was ever charged. What does a novelist owe people who cannot answer back?
Free video visit
Invite A. Tony Mendoza to Your Book Club
Tony joins book club discussions by video at no cost, and in person in El Paso and the Southwest. Tell him about your group and the date you have in mind. He answers every request himself.