Introduction

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Excerpt

There’s a condition called tinnitus where you hear a ringing that isn’t there. It’s not a disease itself, merely a symptom of other maladies, but the constant hum of nonexistent sound has been known to drive the afflicted to madness and suicide. I don’t suffer from this, exactly, but I have a strange feeling now and then that something’s going on in the background. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

1. The Confabulist ultimately poses the question can we trust our memories to provide an accurate record of what has actually happened to us in our lives? What do you think the answer is? Did the book make you think differently about your own memories of your past and how accurate they might be, how others might have remembered the same events differently?

2. Have you ever known anyone with an illness that affected his or her memory? Did the novel in any way change your understanding of that experience?

3. At what point did you realize that Martin’s relationship to Houdini might not be as he was remembering it? Which of the Martin–Clara memories do you think really happened and which were unintentionally invented?

4. As The Confabulist makes clear, magic tricks take advantage of the human mind’s tendency to make assumptions and become distracted. How does Steven Galloway employ these techniques in telling the story of Martin and his relationship with Houdini? Do you see how the Houdini story in the book is its own kind of magic trick, and Martin, as narrator, is our unwitting magician?

5. What is Alice’s true relationship to Martin? What parallels do you think Alice sees between Martin, as she has known and remembers him, and the version of Houdini he shares with her?

6. What role does history play inn The Confabulist? Where is the line drawn about what history knows for a fact about Houdini, about what some people suspect, and about what Martin’s mind invented? Are there clear distinctions? In this way, might it be possible to compare our public understanding of history with our personal understanding of our memories of ourselves?

7. The idea of secrets is threaded throughout The Confabulist. How does keeping a secret change how you interact with the people around you? How does it change your relationship to what the truth really is? Think not only in terms of the book, when answering, but also beyond it.

8. Think about the larger implications of false memory. In what way can false memory be destructive? In what way can it be something positive?

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