Night People
Cut along the dashed lines and pass the cards around the table.
Before we talk about the book at all: what song, if someone put it on right now, would make you feel instantly at home?
Reading this, did you find yourself missing a particular place or period of your own life? Tell us a little about it.
Ronson writes about the 1990s New York night as a world with its own rules and warmth. Did it read to you as a place you wish you could have wandered into, or one you were glad to visit only on the page?
Which passage made you feel the most tenderness toward young Mark, still figuring it out and not yet good at it?
The book is largely about learning a craft slowly, in public, badly at first. What were you once a beginner at, and who was kind to you while you were?
A DJ's whole job is reading a room and giving people what they need. Where in your own life do you do a version of that, and does it feel like love or like labor?
By the time you closed the book, did it feel more like a love letter to a vanished city or like a thank-you note to the people who let him in? Which reading comforted you more?
Ronson is looking back at his younger self with decades of distance and a lot of affection. If you wrote 256 pages about one stretch of your early twenties, what would you want to be gentle about?