Reading Group Guide

To the Man I Called Father

by Jonah A. Thorne III

A Note for Reading Groups

This book carries its own content warnings, placed before five specific chapters. They are there for a reason, and a group should honor them: any member may skip a chapter, or skip a question, without explaining why. Saying that out loud before you begin changes the quality of the conversation more than any question in this guide.

The book deals with the sexual abuse of a child by her grandfather, severe medical trauma, family estrangement, and suicide. The questions below are written to be answered about the book. Some will land close to home for some readers. That is worth allowing for and worth not requiring. Resources are listed at the end.

How the Book Is Built

Every chapter is stamped with its distance from a single Saturday morning — the day the author learns what his father has done. The early chapters run backward from it (Deep Roots at forty-six years before; The Wedding at two months); the later ones count forward in hours, then weeks, then years. The day itself is marked Ground Zero.

The exception is the opening chapter. The Letter takes place at seven years and ten days after — near the end of the story. The reader learns that this man forgives his father before learning what there is to forgive.

About the Book

For fifty-two years, Jonah Thorne’s father was the finest man he knew: the one who taught him to swing a hammer, who carried him bleeding to the car, who stood by the gurney despite his own terror of needles. They spoke nearly every morning for twenty years.

Then, on an ordinary Saturday, in the middle of assembling a drawing table with his son, Jonah’s wife calls him downstairs and says one sentence — and every memory he owns changes meaning at once.

What follows is a decade: a son blinded by a routine prescription, a daughter groomed and assaulted for years by the man the family trusted most, a criminal case that consumes five more, and a family that closes ranks around the accused. And then, after all of it is finally over, the quiet year in which the man who held everything together comes apart.

To the Man I Called Father is an account of what it costs to be the one who holds on — and of a letter, 135 words long, written seven years later to a man in prison.

About the Author

To the Man I Called Father is an account of what it costs to be the one who holds on — and of a letter, 135 words long, written seven years later to a man in prison.

Discussion Questions

What's in a name?

1. In second grade, Jonah stands up at his desk to correct a teacher: he is not the Third, he is the Sword. He is proud enough of the name to pass it to his son. By the end of the book he writes that it is “a name that is now on a sexual predator list.” Trace what happens to that name across four generations. What does a shared name give a family, and what can it cost one?

2. In the criminal filings, Chloe appears only as “CT.” Her civil lawyer tells her she can simply initial the contract. She buys a pink pen, practices, and signs her full name across the page — and her father says he knew in that moment she would never be a victim. Why does a signature do what four years of court could not?

3. The author publishes under a name he explains at the very end: Jonah for what he endured, Thorne for the pain, III because four generations share it. The one name he will not put on this book is his real one — the name he was so proud of. What is he protecting, and what is he giving up?

Two sets of hands.

Nearly a third of the book passes before the reader reaches the discovery. We get the giant wooden hammer, the three-ton sand gorilla, the brick tie in the knee, the father who hated needles and never left the gurney. Why does the author spend so long in that childhood before he tells us what is coming? Would you have built it the same way?

5. Holding his son’s hand through an injection into the eye, he writes: “I understood exactly what my own father must have felt when I was the one on the gurney.” The book is full of these rhymes — a dog’s collar carried home alone, a father watching a car until it is out of sight, a one-way ticket, a car left behind and kept running. Find one that stayed with you. What is the book arguing by setting them side by side?

6. Kallie weeps reading the early chapters of her husband’s manuscript — for “the man she too loved and lost.” His therapist asks whether he can let the childhood memories back “without letting him back in.” Is that possible? Did the Viking funeral in the backyard accomplish it?

What Was in Plain Sight

. The IMVU chapter is the hardest in the book to read a second time. He finds three words in pink neon above a bed his fourteen-year-old built, drives her to a halfway house parking lot, and lets her believe he might leave her there. He keeps the memory “as proof of how far she had drifted.” What was he actually looking at? What does the book ask of a reader who sees it before he does?

8. His sister Karen sees their father with his hand up Chloe’s dress, later finds his calls to Chloe in the company phone records, tells him to stop — and tells no one else. Three weeks later Chloe is abused for five straight nights. Is Karen’s silence a different kind of failure from her brother’s blindness, or the same kind wearing different clothes?

9. Locked doors. Lights left on. Twelve hours of sleep. A girl bleeding through her clothes on a plane. The author writes: “When it’s happening in the moment, you don’t have any idea they are even part of the same puzzle.” Is that true — or is it what we tell ourselves afterward? What would it actually take to see it in time?

The Cost of Holding On

10. He compares himself to a clay piece with hairline cracks that cannot survive the kiln — cracks that are “catastrophic not just to itself, but to every piece next to it.” Who are the pieces next to him? Which of them cracks, and when?

11. For years he cannot say, to his wife or his employer, that he is no longer able to carry it: “How do I admit that they can no longer rely on me?” Why is that the hardest sentence in the book for him to speak? Is that difficulty particular to men, or to anyone who has been the one everyone leans on?

12. He steps toward traffic and a dog’s wet nose stops him. He calls it grace. Another reader might call it luck, or a dog being a dog. Does the book require you to agree with him for the moment to land?

Justice, and What It Is Not

13. Years of grooming and more than thirty physical acts are charged as three counts. A prosecutor tells him, “The state doesn’t like to pile on first-time offenders,” and later, “I don’t represent your daughter. I represent the state.” On the evidence of this book, what is the criminal justice system actually for?

14. His 3,600-word victim impact statement wins a seven-year sentence — and then becomes the grounds for the appeal that reduces it to four. The whole truth he insisted on telling is the instrument his father’s lawyers use. What do you do with an irony like that?

15. Of the five girls in Chloe’s therapy group, only two see any justice at all, and only Chloe takes the stand. Her father argues the harder road was the right one, because he could already see the regret waiting for her. Do you agree? What would you have counselled your own child to do?

16. When the assets have all been moved, he tells the lawyer: “Take everything.” He also admits he had stopped pretending he could not hear the part of himself that had razed a game server at two in the morning and broken both hands on a heavy bag. Was that justice, or was it the other thing? Does the book know the difference?

Forgiveness, and the Ones Still Missing

17. The book opens with the letter and only then goes back forty-six years. You know he forgives before you know what he is forgiving. How did that change the way you read the childhood chapters — and would the book be stronger or weaker told in order?

18. The letter runs 135 words and never once mentions his daughter. “I do not write this for him,” he says. Who is it for? He never learns whether it reached his father’s hands, and writes that this “will have to be enough.” Can forgiveness be complete without the other person’s knowledge or participation?

19. Looking down at his parents from six floors above a courthouse plaza, he feels “a resounding nothing,” and concludes: “There is no such thing as unconditional love from a child to a parent.” Is he right? And in the final pages, the last words his son speaks to him are “You’ll never lose me” — while the son is still gone. Do you read that line as a promise or as a goodbye?

Enhance Your Book Club

— Build the timeline before you meet. Have one member lay the chapter stamps out on paper — forty-six years before, then hours, then years after. Seeing the whole decade in one view changes what the early chapters feel like.

— Watch the last ten minutes of Rocket Gibraltar (1988). It is the film that gives the author the idea for the Viking funeral he holds in his backyard for his father’s last birthday.

— Name the faith question rather than avoiding it. The final chapters turn explicitly toward God, and a group whose members do not share that faith will read the forgiveness differently from one that does. That difference is worth discussing out loud; it is one of the more interesting conversations the book offers.

— Set one ground rule before you start: anyone may pass on any question without explaining why.

— For groups that want to go further: Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery; Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving; Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score.

Questions for the Author

As a group prepare and discuss the top 3 questions you would ask of the author? Option: Submit your top 3 questions to the author for his personal take then discuss the difference between what the group understood from the book and what the author understands from his own experience. What is the delta?

Resources

988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — Call or text 988. Chat at 988lifeline.org. Free, confidential, 24/7.

RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline — Call 800.656.HOPE (4673). Text HOPE to 64673. Chat at rainn.org/hotline. 24/7, English and Spanish.

1in6 — Helpline and chat at 1in6.org/helpline. Support for men who have experienced unwanted or abusive sexual experiences.

Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline — Call or text 800.422.4453. A support line, not a reporting line.

NCMEC CyberTipline — Report at CyberTipline.org or call 1-800-843-5678, to report child sexual abuse or online exploitation.

Outside the United States — findahelpline.com.

This guide may be freely reproduced for book club and library use.