3. What do you think the significance of the title The Coconut Latitudes is?
4. Is this an end-of-an-era story about a family saga, or a story about the author learning to love her family and herself, despite traumatic events?
5. Discuss the importance of place in this memoir. How does the author use the contrast between life in the Dominican Republic and life in America as a tool?
6. One of the questions this book asks is about the importance of truth and honesty in family relationships, and about acceptance and forgiveness, especially in the relationship to self. Discuss how this is explored in the memoir.
7. In what ways do different kinds of love help Rita to reflect on her life throughout the memoir? Her ties with her sister, mother, and father, before and after their deaths? Her relationship with her childhood dog, and her friendships as a teen? Her love of art, travel, and writing?
8. How does Rita’s relationship with her family change during her last visit home?
9. What do you think most inspires Rita’s final reckoning with family events when she visits the place of her childhood? Her age, the need to let the past and its mysteries go, her role as survivor and keeper of secrets? How is her decision-making process different in later life than it is in her early twenties?
10. A shared love for their life in the Dominican Republic binds Rita and her sister together as children. Do you think that Rita’s need to know Berta’s secret about her disappearance limits their relationship as adult siblings?
11. Discuss how the need for a creative and authentic life leads Rita to the life transition central to her memoir. What other life events do you think form or sustain a person’s sense of meaning in adult life when they have been marked by a childhood trauma?
12. How did your view of each of the characters change as you read the book?
13. Discuss the book’s structure and the author’s use of language and writing style. How does she draw the reader in and keep the reader engaged? Does she convey her story with insight, acceptance, self-pity, or something else?
14. Compare this book to other memoirs your group has read. Is it similar to any of them? What do you think your lasting impression of the book will be?
About the Author
RITA GARDNER grew up on her expatriate family’s coconut farm in the Dominican Republic during the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. Living in a remote coastal village, she was home-schooled and began reading, writing, and painting at a young age. She went to Florida to finish school and later moved to the Bay Area in Northern California, where she follows her passions: trail hiking, traveling, writing, and photography. Her published essays, articles, and poems have appeared in literary journals, travel magazines, and newspapers. Her photographs show in galleries and other venues. She continues to dream in Spanish, dance the merengue, and gather inspiration from the ocean; her favorite color is Caribbean blue.
SELECTED TITLES FROM SHE WRITES PRESS
She Writes Press is an independent publishing company
founded to serve women writers everywhere.
Visit us at www.shewritespress.com.
Don’t Call Me Mother: A Daughter’s Journey from Abandonment to Forgiveness by Linda Joy Myers. $16.95, 978-1-938314-02-5. Linda Joy Myers’s story of how she transcended the prisons of her childhood by seeking—and offering—forgiveness for her family’s sins.
Loveyoubye: Holding Fast, Letting Go, And Then There’s The Dog by Rossandra White. $16.95, 978-1-938314-50-6. A soul-searching memoir detailing the painful, but ultimately liberating, disintegration of a twenty-five-year marriage.
Peanut Butter and Naan: Stories of an American Mom in the Far East by Jennifer Magnuson. $16.95, 978-1-63152-911-5. The hilarious tale of what happened when Jennifer Magnuson moved her family of seven from Nashville to India in an effort to shake things up—and got more than she bargained for.
Splitting the Difference: A Heart-Shaped Memoir by Tré Miller-Rodríguez. $19.95, 978-1-938314-20-9. When 34-year-old Tré Miller-Rodríguez’s husband dies suddenly from a heart attack, her grief sends her on an unexpected journey that culminates in a reunion with the biological daughter she gave up at 18.
Pregnant Pause: A Leg to Stand On: An Amputee’s Walk into Motherhood by Colleen Haggerty. $16.95, 978-1-63152-923-8. Haggerty’s candid story of how she overcame the pain of losing a leg at seventeen—and of terminating two pregnancies as a young woman—and went on to become a mother, despite her fears.
Dearest Ones at Home: Clara Taylor’s Letters from Russia, 1917-1919 edited by Katrina Maloney and Patricia Maloney. Clara Taylor’s detailed, delightful letters documenting her two years in Russia teaching factory girls self-sufficiency skills—right in the middle of World War I.
The Coconut Latitudes: Secrets, Storms, and Survival in the Caribbean Page 18
