Speech Team

Description

“A tender-hearted novel and a dream to read. I loved this book.” — Matt Haig #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Midnight Library

A funny, gossipy and ultimately poignant novel about four Gen X teen friends turned 21st-century adults who awkwardly come back together to confront an influential teacher whose brutal remarks have haunted them all for years.

In his early forties, nonprofit writer Tip Murray is just getting past the wreckage of his youth and settling into semi-humdrum married New England domesticity. Things take an unusual turn when he receives shocking news from his high school best friend, hippie farmer Natalie, that one of their former teammates from speech team, Pete, has committed suicide. Surprisingly mentioned in Pete’s final Facebook post?  A devastating comment made to him by their speech team coach, Gary Gold.

Feeling nostalgic for their 80s adolescence, Tip and Nat decide to reconnect with two long lost friends from the team, haughty menswear designer Anthony and tightly wound college professor Jennifer. The reunited quartet quickly discover an unsettling thread: all were quietly wounded by Mr. Gold’s deeply cutting remarks. The silver lining? Gold is still alive, and a quick Google search shows that he has retired to Florida. There’s only one thing left to do: fly down to a posh resort to confront him. What happens next is far from what any of them could have imagined.

Fueled by cringe-y confrontations and 80s nostalgia, a literary mashup of The Breakfast Club and The Big Chill, Speech Team explores what it means to take account of the pain that can suffuse a life and what it means, years on, to move forward.

“Tim Murphy is a genius at sweeping, character-driven stories that suck you in until the very last page, and Speech Team is no exception.” —Andy Cohen“A hugely absorbing and deeply heartfelt tale about friendship, unhealed scars and second chances.” —Star Tribune

“Touching”—The Washington Post

“Tim Murphy is a genius at sweeping, character-driven stories that suck you in until the very last page, and Speech Team is no exception.” —Andy Cohen

“It is a dream to read and Tim Murphy cares so much for his characters that you absolutely believe they live. Which, thanks to snappy dialogue and emotional characterization, they do. Ultimately, it is a book about growing up and how we do it. I am a total newbie to the world of Speech Teams but I loved this book.” —Matt Haig author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, The Midnight Library

“Murphy, a longtime journalist and author of the novels Christodora (2016) and Correspondents (2019), again brings his finely tuned ability to portray subtle group dynamics to bear in this semiautobiographical update of the Big Chill trope…Misfit kids of the 1970s and ’80s—here’s the class reunion you were waiting for.” —Kirkus

“Bittersweet, witty, and rife with ‘80s nostalgia, Speech Team tells the story of old friends on a mission for accountability and closure.” —Bustle

“Hopeful, darkly comic, and brimming with nostalgia, Speech Team follows a plucky cast of misfits as they reckon with how the past haunts their present. Twenty-five years after graduating high school and growing apart, a shocking event reunites four friends to confront the teacher who both saved and tormented them as teenagers. Their quest is compelling on its own, but it’s Tim Murphy’s tender, compassionate prose that hooked me—that, and all the delicious messiness. Like the juiciest gossip, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll want to call a friend and scream. This book gives new meaning to what it means to forgive and forget.” —Edgar Gomez, author of High Risk Homosexual

“Very few novelists can write with such daring, hilarity, and heartbreak as Tim Murphy. Speech Team is so wildly entertaining you don’t realize its punch until it knocks you flat. The novel is an ode to growing up in the ’80s and reliving those messy, uncouth years in relatively wiser adulthood. But its real subject is the wounds inflicted in our youth that become both our making and unmaking. Murphy creates characters so vivid we don’t want to let them go.” —Christopher Bollen, author of The Lost Americans and A Beautiful Crime

“Speech Team is irresistible: a poignant, funny, achingly relatable tale of youth, aging, and friendship—and the universal process of untangling the past to stitch together the present and future. This is one of those rare novels that’s both illuminating and delightful; I swallowed it whole.”—Lauren Acampora, author of The Hundred Waters and The Paper Wasp

“Speech Team is a page-turning pleasure, with a clear-eyed exploration of rediscovered friendships, the unruly passage of time and the extreme unlikeliness of ever truly growing up. Tim Murphy’s writing is joyously specific and acerbically moving, with a deep affection for every sort of character. Readers will cherish this book.” —Paul Rudnick, author of Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style

“How Tip, Anthony, Nat and Jenn confront their tormentor, and what happens, is unexpected and surprising. A page turning, often funny caper that is also a smart exploration of Gen X characters caught between Old Guard Baby Boomer power and today’s hyper-awareness of trauma and identity. Speech Team asks: Can we ever liberate ourselves from the past?” —Mike Albo, author of Another Dimension of Us

“Like the oratory of its misfit gang of multi-culti characters, Speech Team grabs your attention, holds on tight, makes you laugh, makes you think, and might change your mind about a thing or two along the way. First place!” —James Hannaham, author of Delicious Foods and Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta

“A high school revenge fantasy disguised as a romp, shot through with longing and loss, narrated by a gimlet-eyed gay ringleader? Please and thank you, Tim Murphy.” —Christopher Castellani, author of Leading Men

“Tim Murphy’s riveting Speech Team bravely and beautifully wrestles with two of the fiercest taboos in today’s contentious zeitgeist — nuance and forgiveness.” —Blair Fell, author of The Sign For Home

“Speech Team is a provocative look at how words matter, how they can shape our whole lives. This book left me contemplating the hope we seek in relationships, the courage it takes to face the past, and the power of simply being loved. Told with sharp humor and deep insight, this is an important story for where we are today.” —Maulik Pancholy, award winning author and actor


Tim Murphy is the author of Correspondents and Christodora, which was long-listed for the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian. He has also been a journalist for the past twenty-five years.Reader’s Guide for SPEECH TEAM by Tim Murphy

 
1.      Speech Team finds its cast of characters reaching back from the year 2012 to their ‘’80’s high school experience from the year 2012, after the suicide of one of their high school friends. This return to the past in search of resolution has profound and unpredictable consequences on the characters, and their relationships with one another. What does this novel have to say about the search for emotional resolution?

2.      Speech Team spans its characters’ lives over several decades, tracing the societal and political shifts that took place from the ‘’80s to the early 2010s, and their impact on the characters’ senses of self, and views of each one another. How do each character’s choices, perspectives, and emotions embody this shift?

3.      Race and class figure quite prominently in Speech Team, and affect both the characters themselves, and the relationships among them. What does this evoke for you, and what does it make you think about with regards to your own life, or the lives of those you love?

4.      A central tension within Speech Team is the friction between the present and the negative, painful memories of the past. With Tip acting as the first-person narrator, we get a sense for of how this tension plays out within him. How does it shape his life and his relationship to himself?

5.      Consider the relationship between Anthony and Tip throughout the years, both as friends and as occasional lovers. What do you think their respective material conditions, aspirations, and relationships to themselves convey? What do you think draws them to one aneach other and keeps them apart?

6.      We see the story from Tip’s point of view[WE1] , and heTip is the only character from whom we get to see the internal experience of the lingering pain and shame inflicted by Gold. What do you make of his Tip’s lashing out during the denouement of the book, his merciless comparison of himself to with his friends, and his spiral back into alcohol abuse?

7.      How do you think Tip’s narrative point of view is used in the book? How does he (or doesn’t he) let us into the other characters’’ perspectives, and what does this tell you about his own?

8.      Jennifer observes that “… whatever our sore thumb factor was, [Gold] found it.” Consider Gold’s motivation and the position of power he held over the characters as high school students. How do Jennifer’s statement and Gold’s position of power affect your perspective on his actions?

9.      How does Gold’s condition, and the characters’ indelible memories of what he did to them, affect what the book has to say about the nature of memory and the ways it can shape a life?

10.   Has anyone ever said something to you in the vein of what Gold says to his students, something that has stuck with you your whole life? How did it affect you? Do you recall saying anything that may have had a similar effect on others?

11.   Time is a major theme in the book (after all, it spans nearly thirty years). How is the passage of time used in the book, and to what effect?
 US

Additional information