by Jenni Ogden
(b) What about blended families and situations where children are co-parented by separated parents? How might these scenarios influence decisions about work-family balance?
(c) If you have been in a situation where one parent spends more time at work than the other, how did you and your partner, and/or other parent decide whose career was more important? Do you think same-sex parents might have a different idea of fairness than heterosexual couples? Why?
(d) By the end of the novel had the work-family balance between Georgia and Adam changed? If so, what factors played into this?
2. Anxiety Disorders
(a) At the start of the novel we learn that Georgia had suffered from episodes of anxiety for many years, that she believed she had these under control, and that her colleagues at the hospital weren’t aware of this side of her. She believed that if they knew, this would damage her chance of being appointed the Director of Neurosurgery, a role that in the past had always gone to a man. Do you think her fear that she would be discriminated against unfairly if it were known she had an anxiety disorder was valid? Are men in the workplace treated differently than women if they have a mental health problem?
(b) Neurosurgery is a profession that, unlike many other medical specialties, is still dominated by men. It is seen as a ‘tough’ career and not one where the doctor can take time out to have a child, or go part-time. Thus women who want or have children tend not to choose it as their specialty. Do you think this point-of-view should be challenged? Can you think of demanding careers that were once closed to women who wanted to take time out for parenting, but where women are now both successful and accepted? Is there any career that requires total dedication to the work at the expense of family and other aspects of life?
With my psychologist’s hat on: As part of their ongoing registration requirements, many ‘helping’ professions require regular supervision or mentoring. For example, for practicing psychologists this is expected even at senior career levels. Perhaps if this had been a requirement for all the neurosurgeons in the hospital were Georgia worked, she would have (and indeed should have) talked about her anxiety issues with her supervisor as they arose, and she would have been supported in the use of strategies to protect her and her patients from any consequences of an escalation of her symptoms. For example, she might have felt it appropriate to refer a patient on if she considered, for any reason, that she was not in the right frame of mind to treat that patient. Most importantly she would not have felt inadequate or embarrassed by this. Of course, if her anxiety escalated to levels that were unsafe long term, then she would be supported to seek further help and possibly a different career. Different careers suit different people. Professions that believe their practitioners should never require time out are ignoring what it is to be human, thus exposing clients to poor service or worse.
3. Mother-teenager relationships
(a) Georgia’s relationship with Lara was more fraught than her relationship with Finbar. Part of this was due to the ages of the two children and the particular circumstances around Lara’s biological father, but these factors aside, do you think the relationship between mothers and daughters is often more challenging than between mothers and sons? If so, why? Is there a similar dynamic between fathers and sons? How might this be different with same sex parents and their same and different gender children?
(b) Georgia and Lara arrived in New Orleans just before Hurricane Katrina hit. Living through this crisis brought them closer. Why do you think this was? How do you think it changed the way each thought about the other? Has the recent Covid-19 crisis or any other crisis or exceptionally difficult time you have been through with other family members changed the way you see or feel about them? Do you think their view of you has changed?
4. Family Secrets
(a) What was the original family secret, and how did it spread through the generations and become more damaging?
(b) If the child born of the affair between Seamus (Georgia’s father) and Fiona (Danny’s mother) had been Danny and not his brother, then Lara would have been the child of an (unintentional) incestuous union. Would this have changed your opinion of Seamus’s unfaithfulness to Georgia’s mother, and his treatment of Fiona? If you consider that scenario makes his behavior worse, how do you square this with the fact that Seamus could not have predicted who might be a future lover of his and Fiona’s child?
(c) Given that Georgia was pregnant and psychologically fragile, do you think her parents were justified in keeping from her the fact that Danny’s mother had borne a child by Seamus? If so, should they have revealed this secret later, once she was well?
(d) Who owns a family secret? To answer this, you might first need to define what a ‘family’ secret is. For example, is an affair a family secret if it does not result in a child or result in any other obvious outcomes that affect the wider family (such as a change in economic circumstances)? How can the family members who are at the center of the ‘secret’, or discover it, decide whether to tell other family members or keep it to themselves? Do all family secrets become less damaging or hurtful once the people at the center of the secret have died? If you discovered a significant secret that your now dead grandparents had and clearly didn’t want others to know, would you feel it was OK to tell that secret to others in your family (or outside your family through a published memoir)? If you believed it might cause pain or shame to the living descendants, would this change your decision? What if you believed those family members were being overly sensitive? What if the family secret was something so terrible you believed that it should be brought into the open at any cost, and who would be most damaged by that cost?
e) Lara was an intelligent 16-year-old who had just survived Hurricane Katrina when she learned that her grandfather Seamus had been unfaithful to her grandmother and had, as a result, fathered a child, and that therefore Danny’s brother was her uncle both through Danny and through Georgia. What did you think of her acceptance of this? Did it ring true? If Danny had been Seamus’s son, how much worse do you think this would have been for Lara? Consider the well-adjusted teenagers you know; do you think they would be well able to cope with information like this, if they have a good self-image?
With my psychologist’s hat on: Some journalists, supported by anecdotal cases, have suggested that men and women who are closely related but unaware of this are likely to be sexually attracted to each other. While there is no research-based evidence for this, there are increasing concerns about the practice of sperm donation when a single man’s sperm is donated to many women, especially within a relatively small geographical area. Even when, as now common, the sperm donor’s identity is known to the mother, she is unlikely to know the identity of other women who have used his sperm. Thus there is a small but increased chance of half siblings meeting and, not knowing they are related, falling in love. Do you see this as a problem, if they never find out they are related? How does this change if they have children? In today’s world more and more of us are having DNA tests, making genetic secrets increasingly impossible. Should the rules around sperm donation be changed in some way so that teenagers conceived by sperm donation are informed of the names and perhaps given photos of all their half siblings? If so, how could this be achieved whilst still preserving their parent’s wishes (and rights?) to privacy?
5. Titles of Novels
Book club and literary novels often have titles that are somewhat abstract, or intended to hint at a theme in the book. In Chapter 6 of The Moon is Missing, Georgia and her therapist make casual conversation about the clear moonlit skies in New Zealand, where Georgia grew up, as compared to London. Having read the novel, does the title make sense on a deeper level?
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If you enjoyed The Moon Is Missing, please do review it on Amazon and Goodreads, or anywhere else where books are sold (a few sentences—or even just a rating—is all it needs.)
Then sample the first chapters of my award-winning debut novel A Drop in the Ocean, set on another island, this time on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. So far it has sold 80,000 copies and I’d love you to make it 80,001!
A Drop in the Ocean
Jenni Ogden’s Debut Novel
About the book
Anna Fergusson runs a lab researching Huntington’s disease at a prestigious Boston university. When her long-standing grant is pulled unexpectedly, Anna finally faces the truth: she’s 49, virtually friendless, single, and worse, her research has been sub-par for years. With no jobs readily available, Anna takes a leap and agrees to spend a year monitoring a remote campsite on Turtle Island on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. What could be better for an introvert with shattered self-esteem than a quiet year in paradise? As she settles in, Anna opens her heart for the first time in decades—to new challenges, to new friendships, even to a new love with Tom, the charming, younger turtle tagger she sometimes assists. But opening one’s heart leaves one vulnerable, and Anna comes to realize that love is as fragile as happiness, and that both are a choice.
“…everything a reading experience should be, endearing and enduring, time spent with characters who seem to be people I already knew.”—Jacquelyn Mitchard, New York Times #1 best-selling author of The Deep End of the Ocean
“…Anna Fergusson learns that love is about letting go. Jenni Ogden takes us on a sweeping journey, rich with unique characters and places, moving backward and forward in time, to reach this poignant and heartfelt lesson.”—Ann Hood, New York Times best-selling author of The Knitting Circle, The Red Thread, and The Obituary Writer
Read on for the first two chapters…
Chapter 1
On my forty-ninth birthday my shining career came to an inauspicious end. It took with it the jobs of four promising young scientists and catapulted my loyal research technician into premature retirement, an unjust reward for countless years of dedicated scut work.
That April 6th began in precisely the same manner as all my birthdays over the previous fifteen years—Eggs Benedict with salmon, a slice of homemade wholemeal bread spread thickly with marmalade, and not one but two espressos at an Italian café in downtown Boston. On my arrival at eight o’clock sharp, the elderly Italian owner took my long down-filled coat and ushered me, as he had for more years than I care to re- member, to the small table by the window where I could look out on the busy street, today frosted with a late-season snow that had fallen overnight and would soon be gone. He always greeted me with the same words: “Good morning, Dr. Fergusson. A fine day for a birthday. Will you be having the usual?” as if he saw me every morning, or at least every week, and not just once a year.
Perhaps the unusually deep blue cloudless sky, almost suggesting a summer day, should have warned me that something was not quite as it should be. But superstitious behavior is not a strength of mine, and after my indulgent breakfast I walked to my laboratory in one of the outbuildings of the medical school, taking pleasure in the crisp winter air and stopping to collect my mail—in this e-mail era, usually consisting only of advertising pamphlets from academic publishing houses—before entering the lab.
Rachel looked up from her desk with her hesitant smile and gave me a beautifully wrapped parcel—a good novel, as always, the thirtieth she had given me. One for every birthday and one for every Christmas. I have kept them all. “Happy birthday Anna,” she murmured, not wanting to advertise my private business to the others in the lab. Two of my four young research assistants were already at work, hunched over their computers. The other two would be out in the field inter- viewing the families who were the subjects of our research program. Huntington’s families, we called them.
The research I had been doing for the past twenty-four years—first for my PhD, then as a research assistant, and finally as the leader of the team—focused on various aspects of Huntington’s disease, a terrible, genetically transmitted disorder that targets half the children of every parent who has the illness. Often the children are born before the parents realize they carry the gene and long before they begin to show the strange contorted movements, mood fluctuations, and gradual decline into dementia that are the hallmarks of the disease. Thus our Huntington’s families often harbored two or three or even four Huntington’s sufferers spanning different generations.
Thankfully I was spared having to deal with them; I have never been good with people, and especially not sick people. I didn’t discover this unfortunate fact until my internship year after I graduated from medical school. But as they say, when a door closes, a window opens, and I became a medical researcher instead. Of course it took a bit longer, as I had to complete a PhD, but that was bliss once I realized that my forté was peering down a microscope at brain tissue.
So there I was on my forty-ninth birthday, looking at the envelope I held in my hand and realizing with a quickening of my heart that it was from the medical granting body that had financed my research program for fifteen years. Every three years I had to write another grant application summarizing the previous three years of research and laying out the next three years. Every three years I breathed a sigh of relief when they rolled the grant over and sometimes even added a new salary or stipend for another researcher or PhD student. I had become almost—but not quite—blasé about it. The letter had never arrived on my birthday before; I had not been expecting it until the end of the month. So I opened it with a sort of muted optimism. After all, it was my birthday.
“Dear Dr. Fergusson,” I read, already feeling lightheaded as my eyes scanned the next lines, “The Scientific Committee has now considered all the reviewers’ comments on the grant applications in the 2008 round, and I regret to inform you that your application has not been successful. We had a particularly strong field this time, and as you will see by the enclosed reviewers’ reports, there were a number of problems with your proposed program. Of most significance is the concern that your research is lagging behind other programs in the same area.”
I stared glassy-eyed at the words, hoping that I was about to wake up from a bad dream with my Eggs Benedict still to come.
“The Committee is aware of your excellent output over a long period and the substantial discoveries you have made in the Huntington’s disease research field, but unfortunately, in these difficult financial times, we must put our resources behind new programs that have moved on from more basic research and are able to take advantage of the latest technologies in neuroscience and particularly genetic engineering.”
My head was getting hot at this point; latest technologies and genetic engineering my arse. Easy for them to dismiss years of painstaking “basic research,” as they called it, so they could back the new sexy breed of researcher. No way could they accomplish anything useful without boring old basic research in the first place.
“A final report is due on the 31st July, a month after the termination of your present grant. Please include a complete list of the publications that have come out of your program over the past fifteen years. A list of all the equipment you currently have that has been financed by your grant is also required. Our administrator will contact you in due course to discuss the dispersal of this equipment. The University will liaise with you over the closure of your laboratory.
We appreciate your long association with us, and wish you and the researchers in your laboratory well in your future endeavors.”
The other tradition I kept on my birthday was dinner at an elegant restaurant with my friend Francesca. I could safely say she was my only friend, as my long relationship with Rachel was purely work-related, except for the novels twice a year. I was tempted to cancel the dinner and stay in my small apartment and sulk, but something deep inside wanted to connect with a human who cared ab
out me and didn’t think of me as a washed-up old spinster with no more to discover. Fran and I had been friends since our first year at medical school, when we found ourselves on the same lab bench in the chemistry lab, simply because both our surnames began with ‘Fe.’
Fran Fenton and I were unlikely soul mates. She was American, extroverted, gently rounded, and ‘five-foot-two, eyes of blue,’ with short, spiky blond hair. I was British, introverted, thin, and five-foot-eight, eyes of slate, with straight dark hair halfway down my back, usually constrained into a single plait, but on this occasion permitted to hang loose. Fran was also, in stark contrast to me, married, with three boisterous teenagers. She worked three days a week as a general practitioner in the health center attached to the university where my lab was, and we did our best to have lunch together at least once a fortnight. I once went to her house for Christmas dinner but it wasn’t a success; her husband, an English professor, found me difficult, and her teenagers clearly saw me as a charity case. But the birthday dinner was always a special occasion for Fran as well as me, I think.
When she read the letter she was satisfyingly appalled, and said “swines” so violently that there was a sudden hush at the tables around us. When the quiet murmur in the room had resumed, she reached over and put her small, pretty hand over mine. I felt the roughness of the skin on her palm and blinked hard as I realized what a special person she was, never seeming rushed in spite of the massive amount of stuff she did— including slaving over a houseful of kids. Her eyes were watering as well as she said softly, “It’s so unfair. How could they abandon you like this in the middle of your research? What will happen to all your Huntington’s families?” Sweet Fran, always thinking of the plight of others worse off by a country mile than people like us, whereas all I’d been thinking about was myself and how I’d let down my little team.
