Note: There are spoilers ahead for THE BRIGHTNESS.

1. Chad Harbach’s bestselling debut novel, THE ART OF FIELDING, appears a few times as a book-within-a-book within Harbach’s follow-up novel, THE BRIGHTNESS. If you’ve read THE ART OF FIELDING, how did it inform your experience reading THE BRIGHTNESS?

2. How do you think the college campus setting shapes the novel’s central conflict? Does THE BRIGHTNESS remind you of any other campus novels? Why or why not?

3. What do you make of Dahlia and Pammy’s decision to tattoo men that night with that particular phrase? How does this decision affect Dahlia's life in the long term?

4. How does Hunter Stroman interact with and incite the “Witches of Westish”? Is he culpable in any way?

5. What do you think makes Irma so magnetic at Owen and Martin’s wedding? Is it the article she wrote, the persona --- modeled after Dahlia --- that she was performing, or had she simply found the right audience?

6. Pella inspires Owen to write his bestselling sensation, The Art of Fielding. What is it like to be a muse for someone else’s art? How would you feel in her shoes?

7. Mike appears in THE ART OF FIELDING as well as THE BRIGHTNESS. Discuss his arc, and how he grows and changes throughout the latter novel.

8. How culpable are Pella and Mike in the dissolution of their relationship and in Pella’s move to New York? What do you make of the decisions each of them makes?

9. What traits do Irma and Pella have in common with Nicholas’ mother? Do you think those traits were part of what drew Nicholas to them? Discuss why.

10. What do you think is Sylvie’s ultimate message in her video, The Death of My Husband? How do you interpret the final line of the video, when the interlocutor asks if she would prefer a son or a daughter and Sylvie replies, “There’s no way out”?

11. What do you make of Pella’s choice to become a mother at the end of THE BRIGHTNESS?