Introduction

“Her writing is both vividly descriptive and surprisingly insightful.”
—Boston Globe

“It’s the three-dimensional men, women, and children who populate her fiction that I’ll remember for a very long time.”
—Nancy Pearl’s Picks

Following the phenomenal success of her novels Love Walked In and Belong to Me, New York Times bestselling author Marisa de los Santos returns with Falling Together, an emotionally resonant, powerfully moving, and pitch perfect novel about friends, family, and love. Truly modern women’s fiction at its finest, this is the unforgettable tale of a remarkable friendship that ended abruptly, only to be resurrected in great need years later at a college reunion, launching three formerly devoted companions and reluctant family members alike on a sobering, enlightening journey across the world and through the past. Brimming with the author’s trademark wit, vivid prose, and captivating characterizations, Falling Together brilliantly explores our deepest human connections and confirms Marisa de los Santos as one of America’s most exciting contemporary novelists.

Editorial Review

Amazon Exclusive Essay: Marisa de los Santos on Falling Together 

I am an incorrigible homebody. I like my own pillow, my own imperfect showerhead, my coffee and pizza and bagel shops, my little rituals. I am quite old lady-ish about it. I like to write in—and only in—my radically unbeautiful office (I share it with guinea pigs). I like to drive my kids to swimming. At night, the moment when I shut my book, turn off my bedside table light, and know that everyone is sleeping under the same roof, our roof, is as close to a state of grace as I ever hope to come. I have always been this person.

So it is probably not surprising that, until now, my writing has stuck close to home, as well. In the first two novels, my characters did a little meandering but rarely outside of the 95 corridor, never outside of the country. They needed no passports; they never suffered jet lag. And now, with Falling Together, what have I done but put Will, Augusta, Jason, and my poor aviophobic Pen on airplane after airplane and sent them clear across the world? What was I thinking? I was thinking about the story, mostly, and that these were people who, each in her or his own way needed to go in quest of something (apart from Augusta, who has everything she needs). Also, I was thinking that the Philippines, where my father grew up, is too beautiful, too much a part of the landscape of my heart not to write about.

I visited the Philippines for the first time when I was 22 and on Christmas Day, woke up to voluminous sunshine, enfolding heat, a houseful of relatives, and a roasted suckling pig, pointy-eared, tiger’s eye-orange, and smelling like bliss. I was not in Kansas (or Virginia) anymore. I rode in dazzlingly painted jeepneys; I visited roadside fruit stands as resplendent as parade-floats and cemeteries in which people laughed, ate, and talked as though they were in their own living rooms and the gravestones were furniture or friends. I ate a lot: the little fists of bread called Elordes after the boxer; rice sticky with coconut milk; fish with blue bones like a secret; fruit shaped like sea anemones, hedgehogs, brains; heavenly, palm-sized mangoes with flesh you can scoop like custard.

Amid all of these discoveries, the best part was the people, a branch (or palm frond) of my family tree that I had only seen in glimpses. Now, this family surrounded me. I learned that traits I thought were uniquely my father’s—having conversations with his eyebrows, a brusque, instinctive generosity that shrugged off thanks—were family or cultural traits. I learned that home is a word that can stretch. Since that first visit, I’ve been back many times since, especially since my parents retired there six years ago, and every time, home stretches to include something new: a coral reef, a helper’s bewitching baby, a soup made of mung beans, a tiny tarsier’s enormous eyes.

In Falling Together, Pen goes to the Philippines in search of her friend, but I think she finds more than that. She sits in a banca boat with a school of jackfish shoaling beneath it and thinks, awestruck, “All this time, every second: this.” She experiences the world as big and small at the same time. While I sit at my desk, drive my children around, sleep under my roof, all the time, every second, there is another version of home, my home, vibrantly alive and unfolding itself thousands of miles away. The least I could do was put it in a book.

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A Look Inside Falling Together
Click on the images below to open larger versions.

Alona Palms: This endless pool is at the beach resort that inspired the fancy one where part of Falling Together is set.	Charles and Tarsier: The author’s son in the tarsier sanctuary with a tiny friend.	Chocolate Hills: The famous hills in Bohol, from the same overlook where Jason bursts into tears and Pen comforts him.

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Excerpt

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Discussion Questions

1. Describe Pen, Will, and Cat. What were they like as students and how has time changed who they are? All three of them have serious issues involving their fathers. Talk about how their relationships shaped their lives and their outlooks. How did each cope with their emotional wounds? Did you like any one character more than another? Why?

2. What drew Pen, Will, and Calt together, and what was it about each of them that created their magical bond? Why did they lose touch? Would they have come together eventually? What is it like when they are finally united? Would you go across the world to find an old friend?

3. What makes friendships work between people? Why is it often difficult to sustain friendships as we get older? How can we sustain them? Is it sometimes better to let a friendship die? Why? Have you ever enjoyed a friendship as special as that of the trio in the book? How did it begin? How did it impact your life? Can a person live without close friends?

4. Why do Pen and Will decide to go to the reunion after they receive Cat’s email? What are they hoping for in attending? Can we turn back time and reunite in a fulfilling way or are the people we are today just too far removed from our past selves? How do they react to each other when they finally meet up?

5. When they meet at the reunion, Pen suggests they sum up the missing years in four sentences. Think about an old friend you haven’t been in contact with for a while. What would you say in four sentences to describe your life in the time that has passed? Try it with members of your reading group. Think about what has happened since your last meeting and express it in a few sentences.

6. Talk about Jason. What are your impressions of him? What about Pen? Will? Cat? Why did Cat marry him? Did your feelings about him change as you learned more about who he was and what happened to him? What do Pen and Will learn from being with him? What does he learn from them?

7. Pen tells Will about her mother’s homecoming after her father’s death, and her surprise at how happy her mother seems. “’She was in India and Tibet, right?’ he said. ‘Maybe she had some kind of spiritual awakening. Or maybe she’s just glad to be home.’ Will could see how a spiritual awakening and coming home to Pen and Augusta could amount to the same thing.” What do you think this means?

8. Pen has some interesting notions about love. She sees it as an “imperative.” How does this view color how she sees love in her own life and in the lives of those around her—Will, Cat, Jason, Patrick, her mom? Would you say she’s afraid of love?

9. Marisa de los Santos uses the image of falling in several ways throughout the novel. “There were people who could live on their own and be happy, and then there were people like Pen and Margaret who needed the falling together, the daily work of giving and taking and talk and touch.” Discuss this example of falling. Identify others in the novel and explore how they relate to the characters.

10. Love, friendship, family, commitment, parenthood, loss, grief are many of the themes the novel touches upon. Choose one or two and trace how they are explored and resolved through the course of the story in an individual character’s life.

11. When Pen, Will, and Jason meet Cat’s extended family in the Philippines, Pen is enchanted. “You like it here,” Will tells her. “It’s a Pen kind of place.” Why was Pen so taken by Cat’s family?

12. While looking for Cat, Pen has her “jack-fish epiphany.” Explain what insights she gleans, or as her colleague, Amelie describes it, “All is One and All is Different.” Have you ever had a similar kind of “knowing moment” and when did it happen?

13. What finally gives Pen and Will the courage to share their feelings? Why does it take so long? Do you think they will stay in touch with Jason? Will Pen and Will last?

About the Author

An award-winning poet and bestselling author with a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing, Marisa De Los Santos lives in Wilmington, Delaware, with her husband, the children’s book author David Teague, and their son and daughter. She’s the author of the bestsellers Love Walked In and Belong to Me.

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