Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Tarkington)

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Only Love Can Break Your Heart...and then take off on your own:

1. Describe the relationships and family dynamics of the Askew household. Why does Rocky's mother distrust Paul, the smoking-drinking bad boy, while the Old Man remains devoted to him? Talk about the couple's marriage. Consider, also, the relationship between the two brothers.

2. How well has Tarkington shaped his characters? Are they convincing—do they seem to live and breath as real people? Finally, do you come to care about them, flaws and all?

3. What affect does Paul's desertion have on Rocky? Why isn't Rocky angry at his brother?

4. Why is Neil Young's song important to Rocky? What is the song's thematic significance to the novel? Consider the various forms of love at work in this story—as well as the ways that love both hurts and uplifts the characters.

5. Rocky is inducted into manhood by Patricia Culver. What do you think of Patricia? What are the consequences of the affair?

6. Contrast Rocky and Patricia's affair with the burgeoning love between Rocky and Cinnamon. In what way is that love "pure and good and true"?

7. Do the musical and pop culture references enrich the story for you? Are they helpful in setting the mood or in creating a sense of the 1970s and '80s? Or do you find them distracting?

8. Tarkington writes of the era of the 1970s as "the sweaty, nauseous, split-headed peak of the hangover between Watergate and "Morning in America." People, he writes, "believe that the country had, in fact, found sympathy for the devil." Are you old enough to remember those times? Does Tarkington's description ring true to you? Are there any parallels with the societal norms of today?

9. When Leigh insists she can't wait to get away from Spencerville, Rocky tells her, "You won't stay away forever." Why does he say that?

10. This book is described as a classic coming of age: an older, wiser narrator looks back at a younger self during a time of crisis. Surviving the crisis becomes a rite of passage, a threshold leading to maturity. In what way does Only Love Can Break Your Heart conform to that literary model? What does Rocky come to learn about the world and his place in it? How is the older Rocky, our narrator, different from his younger self?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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