Introduction

Parade Magazine's “20 New LGBTQ Books We're Loving This Year”
Women.com's “10 LGBTQ Must-Reads for Pride Month”
She Knows.com's  “10 Books Featuring Mother-Child Relationships & All Their Beautiful Complexity”

In 1967, Fay Stonewell, a water tank escape artist in Florida, leaves for Vietnam to join the Amazing Humans—a jerry-rigged carnival there to entertain the troops—abandoning her disabled teenage son, Dickie, to the care of an abusive boyfriend.

Months after Fay’s departure, Dickie’s troubled home life ends in a surprising act of violence that forces him to run away. He soon lands in Manhattan, where he’s taken in by eccentric artist Laurence Jones. Fay, meanwhile, is also facing dangerous threats. From the night her plane jolts onto a darkened Saigon runway, she is forced to confront every bad decision she’s ever made as she struggles to return to her son. But the Humans owner is hell-bent on keeping her in Vietnam, performing only for war-injured children at a hospital, daily reminders of the son she’s left behind.

Decades later, Dickie is forty, living in a Massachusetts coastal town with a man who’s dying of AIDS, and doing everything he can to escape his past. But although Spin may be giving Dickie what he’s always wanted—a home without wheels—it seems that the farther Dickie runs, the tighter the past clings to him.

Ultimately, What We Give, What We Take is a deeply moving story of second chances and rising above family circumstances, however dysfunctional they may be.

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Excerpt

Chapter One
I was fifteen years old when my mother left me for Vietnam. I want to believe she did it for me. Fay was good at lying, though, and she didn’t lose any sleep over it. Unlike me. I lost my ability to lay my head down, close my eyes, and drift off to dreamland bliss. I lost my name too. Not right away. That would come later. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

From the author:

1. Loss, forgiveness, and survival are all themes in this novel. How do the losses suffered by Dickie, Fay, and Spin differ? How do each of them cope in relation to those losses? Is forgiveness possible for any of them? How do these themes apply to your own life?

2. In the story, Fay’s water tank becomes much more than just a prop to perform her escape routine in. What else does it represent for Fay? For Dickie? How does that change over time for each of them?

3. Fay and Dickie have a complicated mother-son relationship. How do they each view that relationship when they are separated and how does that differ when they are reunited at the story’s end?

4. In order to survive, several of the novel’s characters fantasize about different outcomes for their lives. What are some examples?

5. The number one thing Dickie wants is a home. The Red Cross motto, during the War, was A touch of home in the combat zone. How does that apply to the three homes Dickie lives in in Key West, Queens, and Provincetown? What does “home” mean?

6. Spin becomes increasingly sick with AIDS. Why does Dickie struggle with Spin’s illness and with, subsequently, being expected to take care of him?

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