It's Always the Husband (Campbell) - Discussion Questions

Discussion Questions
1. What is it about the college setting that allows three girls as different as Kate, Jenny and Aubrey to bond? What attracts them to one another? What repels them? If nothing terrible had happened at the end of freshman year, do you think their friendship would have had a future, or would they have gone their separate ways?

2. Kate, Jenny and Aubrey come from very different backgrounds. How is each character shaped by her upbringing and family circumstances? Can the characters’ flaws be explained by their difficult childhoods or their complicated relationships with their parents – or is this just an excuse for bad behavior?

3. Kate is at the center of two love triangles that shape the book. She gets involved with Lucas despite knowing he was Jenny’s high school boyfriend, and she has an affair with Ethan, who is Aubrey’s husband. What forces compel Kate to behave so badly? Is she simply pursuing these men in order to take them away from her best friends, or do you believe her feelings for them? How does the sense of betrayal Jenny and Aubrey feel when Kate steals their men influence their actions toward her?

4. The story cuts back and forth in time between freshman year at Carlisle and the roommates’ reunion twenty years later. Over those two decades, how do the three main characters change? Do they grow up at all? Does marriage, motherhood or career make them wiser, or kinder? At the end of the book, which of the three do you believe is the happiest, or best adjusted?

5. When Kate meets Owen Rizzo in the bar during the thunderstorm, she tells him her name is Maggie Price. Why? What role does Maggie Price’s suicide play in Kate’s inner life over the years? Do you believe she feels guilt for it? Does she feel genuine guilt for what happened to Lucas at the bridge? Is Kate capable of true remorse?

6. Why does Griff love Kate so much? What did you think of his actions toward her throughout the course of their marriage, and at the very end? Throughout the second half of the book, did you believe he killed her? Does he seem remorseful, or not? What do you think his future holds?

7. The three roommates wind up in three very different marriages to three very different men. Were the problems in these marriages a reflection of the women’s innate character flaws? Were they inevitable? If you had to pick one of the three men to be married to — Griff, Ethan or Tim — which would you pick?

8. Which of the three roommates did you like best? Which would you most like to have as a friend? Which is most like you — are you a Kate, an Aubrey or a Jenny, or some combination of the three?
(Questions from the author's website.)

top of page (summary)