Reading Group Guide

Palm Meridian

Grace Flahive

This reading group guide for Palm Meridian includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Grace Flahive. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

*This reading group guide contains spoilers.

Introduction

It’s 2067 and Florida is partially underwater, but even that can’t bring down the residents of Palm Meridian Retirement Resort, a utopian home for women who want to revel in their twilight years. Hannah Cardin has spent ten happy years under these tropical, Technicolor skies, but after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis, she has decided that tomorrow morning she will close her eyes for the very last time. Tonight, however, Hannah and her raucous band of friends are throwing one hell of an end-of-life party. And with less than twenty-four hours left, Hannah is holding out for one final, impossible thing. Among the guest list is Sophie, the love of Hannah’s life. They haven’t spoken since their devastating breakup over forty years ago, but today, Hannah is hoping for the chance to give her greatest love one last try. As Hannah anxiously awaits Sophie’s arrival, her mind casts back over the highs and lows of her kaleidoscopic life. But when a shocking secret from the past is revealed, Hannah must reconsider if she can say goodbye after all.

Topics & Questions for Discussion

1. Brainstorm some adjectives you would use to describe Hannah, Esme, Luke, and Sophie. What traits do they have in common? Conversely, which parts of their personality create the biggest rifts between them?

2. In Esme’s speech during Hannah’s goodbye party, she says that one of things that Hannah has most loved in her life are “seasons” (page 159). What role do the seasons, and the weather play in setting the tone of each chapter and the novel as a whole? Looking at this another way, what other meaning could “seasons” hold other than the divisions of the year? How does the novel both lament and celebrate the changing seasons of one’s life?

3. Throughout the novel, the story of Hannah’s life is revealed intermittently as we follow her through her last day. How did the slow reveal of information affect your interpretation of the story? How would the story change if it was written chronologically, or if we only saw the last day without any backstory?

4. In the novel, the effects of climate change have dramatically altered everyday life. How does this context affect the stakes of the story? How does it affect your read emotionally?

5. In the later years of their lives, both Hannah and Luke are unmarried with no children. However, Hannah lives in community, and Luke lives alone. How do you think their upbringings affected the way they were able to form relationships throughout their lives?

6. Gender and queerness play a significant role in the novel. Palm Meridian Retirement Resort is a safe haven and dedicated space for queer women and trans and non-binary people. How does queerness figure into the way that Hannah lives her life, beyond simply romantic and sexual attraction? What effect do you think it has on her definition of community and family?

7. How does this novel challenge stereotypes about growing older? In what ways do these characters exceed or fit expectations for what life typically looks like in a retirement home?

8. Palm Meridian Retirement Resort is a place where people of a variety of backgrounds, life experiences, and perspectives converge and make a home together. In other words, it is a community that embraces complexity. How does the novel portray both the benefits and the challenges of living in community with others? How do each of the characters engage with their community in their own way?

9. Hannah and Esme’s relationship changes throughout the novel, and their level of intimacy waxes and wanes over the course of their lives. Does their love for one another transcend the limits of strict labels like “platonic” or “romantic”? What affects their capacities for intimacy?

10. What can Luke’s betrayal of Hannah tell us about his character? How does self-interest and the desire for love affect his decision making? How did his early life contribute to his desperation for connection?

11. In this novel, sex and attraction between older people is natural and encouraged. How does the author specifically cultivate this impression? What impact did it have on you as a reader?

12. How does the figurative language in the novel help contribute to the overall mood? What sensory details stood out to you?

13. In the final moments of Hannah’s life, her reunion with Sophie comes without the gratification of a conversation. Is there still a sense of closure without a grand reunion? What can this moment tell us about showing up for people as an expression of love? Are there other powerful nonverbal expressions of love throughout the novel?

Enhance Your Book Club

1. Reimagine a scene from the novel seen through the eyes of a character other than Hannah. For example, how might Luke have felt watching Sophie and Hannah kissing on the breakwaters at Lake Huron? How might small Eileen have experienced sitting on the bed with Hannah, away from the party?

2. The novel ends without Sophie and Hannah being able to talk to each other one last time. Write a paragraph or two imagining what that conversation might have been like if they had had the chance. What would they say to one another after all these years? What is the most important thing they could tell one another in such a brief moment?

3. Cast the Palm Meridian movie or miniseries: Choose your top picks for the main roles and make a case to the larger group about who would best embody each character.

4. Palm Meridian Retirement Resort is the community of Hannah’s dreams. Create your own dream retirement plan. Who is there with you? Where is it located? What activities are you frequently partaking in? What do you want to continue doing as you age, and what are some new things you’d like to try?

5. Make a list of other books or media that portray older characters with a similar lust for life. How do they compare to Palm Meridian? What are some major similarities and differences between them?

A Conversation with Grace Flahive

Where did the inspiration for this novel come from?

Palm Meridian is set in Florida in the year 2067, and I first set foot in the state seventy years prior to this, in 1997, as a five-year-old on a family vacation. Leaving behind the snow-piled streets of Toronto, we landed in this humid, otherworldly place—a place of thick vegetation, gurgling swamps and perfectly kitschy pink motels. Even the destination names smelled of sunshine: Briny Breezes, Coconut Grove. Florida burrowed its way into my heart from the very beginning, and in subsequent trips throughout my life, I always knew I’d set a story there.

One place in particular that has forever stuck with me from those earliest trips is the Disney resort All Star Music (which I believe still exists!). I remember it as extremely 90s and extremely camp, all in bright colors, with giant musical instruments. It was the obvious place to take nostalgic inspiration from once I knew I wanted to write about a very colorful, slightly surreal retirement resort!

When did you start writing Palm Meridian? Are there any books or other media that you drew upon for inspiration?

I started writing Palm Meridian in earnest in the summer of 2022, after many, many false starts and discarded first chapters that explored related—but not quite right—ideas. I’ve always admired big, ambitious stories that capture an entire, beautiful, tumultuous lifetime—like the films Big Fish or The Notebook. I wanted to try it for myself and cover a broader span of time than I’d ever attempted before. I wanted that emotional payoff of seeing a love that has transcended time and to see the same characters at both ends of their life.

What was your writing process like? Are you a writer that likes to plan out the entire plot first or do you prefer to improvise as you go? How did you develop your characters?

I usually start with one big, chaotic document where I write down anything and everything that excites me at that time or that I feel drawn to—images, phrases, themes, locations, character traits, and sometimes even songs that capture an emotion I’d like to take inspiration from. Eventually, I coalesce all these scraps of ideas into a bare-bones premise, and from there I’ll create a point-form chapter outline with a basic plot, knowing this will probably change drastically as I move through the process. For the first draft, all bets are off, and my only job is to tell myself the story! On a second draft, it will become clearer what I’m most excited about, and what needs to be cut or rethought entirely. On later drafts, things get much sharper, and I can have fun building texture and motifs and drawing linkages between different parts of the story. In its earliest forms, Palm Meridian was a story about an eighty-year-old woman who lived in a high-rise hotel in coastal Florida that was battered by worsening storms. Once I landed on the more specific idea—an end-of-life party at a Florida retirement resort for queer women—I had something to really run with and explore.

Characters are a really fun part of this process, and I usually approach characterization through an action or a gesture at first—like small Eileen doing her security laps before the party, or baby Hannah play-acting as a hula hoop or a slug!

How has your own experience of queerness influenced the way you write and the kinds of characters you create?

Nothing I wrote before Palm Meridian had very many queer characters—something that seems completely wild to me now!—and once I decided this book would prioritize queer characters, something clicked, and the writing relaxed and flowed. It felt like home, probably because queerness is my home—it’s what’s natural to me, and all I’ve ever known. I feel strongly that Palm Meridian is a love story that can be enjoyed by anyone of any sexual orientation, but the fact of it being founded in queerness is what made the difference for me as a writer—it let me access a sense of humor, a sense of resilience, a sense of absurdity that makes the book distinctly itself.

Which of your characters were you most excited to write? Would you ever return to that character or any others in a sequel or related story?

Every character was so much fun to write in their own way (and even more fun was throwing them all together in a room and seeing what interactions they would have and imagining what roles they would play in the friendship group at the resort!). But one character that stands out to me is Esme—sparkling, charismatic, fearless, flawed, and the life of the party. In so many ways she represents what the book is all about. We get little glimpses of her earlier life through Hannah’s story—her riotous university years, her marriage to Theo in their early thirties—but hers is a story that could definitely be interesting to explore in greater detail someday.

Palm Meridian defies genre and incorporates many elements that make it totally one-of-a-kind. It’s speculative, in that it imagines the future, and it’s one that’s ravaged by climate change. The characters experience frequent weather events, the unreliability of internet and phone connection, and the permanent flooding of coastal areas. Despite this instability and danger, you manage to make this story tender and life-affirming. In writing this novel, what message did you hope to convey to readers about the state of the world today? How important are hope, love, and connection to our future?

I completed the final edits of Palm Meridian in September 2024, not knowing what would happen in the US election just a couple months later. Palm Meridian has always been about community and resilience, about the triumph of hope over despair, and having optimism for the future, and now those things feel even more urgent than before. With dystopian news alerts popping up minute by minute, it’s hard these days to imagine what will happen in the next few weeks, let alone the next few years. But I hope Palm Meridian can, in its own little way, function as a story to hang a bit of hope upon. Hannah’s own life timeline matches up almost exactly with my own—her future is my future and that of my friends. Barring the genuine end of the world, most people born in the 90s, like me, will be alive in 2067. As much as it sounds like science fiction, 2067 is a real future where we will all be going about the tasks of our lives—eating breakfast, having relationships—just like the people of Palm Meridian Retirement Resort. Their future is our future and it’s up to us to fight like hell for it today.

Throughout her life, Hannah travels around North America. You personally grew up in Toronto, went to college in Montreal, and now live in London. How did your own experiences moving around influence the way you imagined Hannah’s life? How formative are these changes and what role can they play in the development of one’s identity?

When beginning a writing project, I almost always start with a place, and this place almost functions as the story’s first character. In the case of Palm Meridian, the resort was such a rich, exciting location to have at the center of the book, and I quickly realized I’d have the chance to explore many other settings, too, in the telling of Hannah’s life story. There were many reasons I gave Hannah the job of a high-flying business owner but one of the reasons was selfish—it let me send her all over the world! In the end, the story touches upon Montreal, New York, Las Vegas, Zermatt, Tokyo, and my current home, London (if only for a few very fateful lines…).

I went to university in Montreal, living there from the ages of seventeen to twenty-one, and these were in many ways the most formative years of my life so far. That time was characterized by adventure, heartbreak, pain, inspiration, thrill, homesickness, longing, and like in the book, lots and lots of snow! To have been able to pay tribute to Montreal in this story, through Hannah’s early life, is something really special and quite emotional for me. Like me, Montreal is a place that she never quite shakes.

The novel places great emphasis on the choice to live in community, especially queer community, and the possibility of fulfillment beyond the nuclear family. What does living in community mean to you? How does queerness open doors to new possible meanings of the word “family”?

So many queer people are met with hostility straight from childhood, becoming targets of hate from the people who are meant to care for them the most: their family. Even for those, like me, who have been fortunate enough to have extremely open-minded, accepting families, making your way through the world as a queer person can feel anywhere from daunting to downright dangerous, depending on the setting. Having queer spaces allows respite from this—that relaxing of the shoulders when you enter a favorite gay bar, or the handholding with your partner that’s no longer taboo when you’re in a room full of other lesbians (lesbians are always holding hands).

The queer friendship groups and communities that I’ve had the privilege to be a part of throughout my life and to this day are incredible sources of solace and hilarity. They’re places to share, gossip, commiserate and take a break amidst chosen family, but they’re also places of deep political importance. If we’re all going to make it to 2067 (and stand up against billionaire oligarchs), it’s communities like this that are going to get us there!

The concept of “seasons,” both in weather and in life, is a major theme in the novel, and Hannah’s love of seasons is an important part of her character. How did you land upon seasons as a concept you’d like to incorporate into the novel? Do you find that you use that terminology to describe different eras within your own life?

The theme of seasons was one I came to organically after a couple of drafts of the book. I was really enjoying this contrast that was coming up—switching back and forth from young Hannah in her snowy, sub-zero Montreal to older Hannah in sweltering Florida. Once I’d spotted this theme, I leaned into it as a motif, making Hannah the head of a literal heating and cooling empire. I realized there were many different contrasts like this running throughout the book—as well as extremes of temperature, there were extremes of age (seeing Hannah’s conception to her dying day) and extremes of emotion (the single best moments of Hannah’s life as well as the very worst). (On a side note, I’m not sure this can be classed as a proper Easter egg, but I settled on the character name “Luke” as in “lukewarm”—a character who doesn’t quite belong within this framework of extreme temperatures, and who doesn’t perhaps embrace life’s extremes like the other characters!)

The contrasting extremes tied nicely with another wider theme that was developing, of beginnings and ends—obviously the beginning and end of Hannah’s life, but also the smaller ends and beginnings throughout the book, like the multiple times that New Year’s Eve is celebrated—Hannah is conceived at a New Year’s party, and Hannah and Sophie celebrate midnight in a Vermont diner. In all these instances, the end represents a new beginning, just as the end of a season represents the start of something new. Our time is measured and experienced in seasons, and Palm Meridian is ultimately a story about time—the impact it has on us, and the ability of love to transcend this. One of my favorite lines in the whole book is: I hope you agree that “time” is a bit beside the point entirely. My time with you was a place. It was my home.

On a more personal note, I was born and raised in the extreme climate of Canada but have lived in the milder and more temperate UK for over a decade. I think all the talk about seasons was a way for me to experience those gorgeous autumns and much-deserved springs that I’ve been missing!

Your older characters defy common age-based stereotypes and expectations. They have powerful desires and take brave action. They are vital representation of an elder generation of queer people that is often missing from mainstream media. What inspired you to write their stories?

The world is heading in strange and frightening directions, and in this book, I wanted to imagine what life might be like for myself and my friends at seventy-five or eighty years old. Palm Meridian is a story of millennial retirement (an oxymoron, surely!), and it envisions a future I would love to live in. In this way, at least at the beginning, I didn’t see it primarily as a story about older people, as silly as that sounds—I saw it as a story about myself and the other thirtysomethings around me. Though obviously, when you add forty years to a thirtysomething, you get seventy-year-old characters! And this is where the real fun and meaning of Palm Meridian came in—I had accidentally given myself an opportunity to explore older queer life, which I haven’t seen represented widely, if at all, in media.

Older queer people fought for the rights of our community, and hold invaluable personal knowledge about our history, but in so many ways our culture patronizes and devalues the perspectives of anyone over the age of fifty (let’s be honest—probably younger if you’re a woman!). Truthfully, I have no idea what it really feels like to be seventy-seven or eighty-five or ninety, but I suspect I won’t feel any less vital in my soul, or any less myself, should I be lucky enough to get there. I wrote the characters in Palm Meridian as bold, brash, and full of life because that’s how I felt they deserved to be, and because that is what I hope for myself.

What do you hope readers take away from this novel?

One thing I’ve always found hard to shake, throughout my life, is the absurdity and strangeness that we are here at all. We’re going about our days, eating soup, walking terriers, making podcasts, and we’re hurtling through space on a giant rock in an infinite universe. To think about it—really think about it—fills me with a kind of awe and thrill like I’m staring over a great precipice. How strange and wonderful and terrifying to have ears and eyes and a nose and no idea whatsoever what we’re doing here! This is a long-winded way of saying that I hope Palm Meridian inspires a bit of this feeling—that Hannah’s reckoning with her mortality reflects a bit of our own. I’d love for readers to take away a sense of bittersweet triumph—yes, life makes no sense, and yes, we’ll all die someday, but how beautiful to be here, together, temporarily, with silly friends and silly jokes and absolutely no clue. I think that’s something to celebrate.