Rehana Lynda
Mohamed

At the Same Damn Time · Rehana Lynda Mohamed

Reading group discussion guide

Twelve questions, the same ones printed at the back of the book. They assume everyone has finished it, so save them for the meeting. Print this page and the guide comes out on its own.

1. Re thinks in “system logs” and diagnostic language—literally reframing her emotions as data to be measured and controlled. Where in the novel does this coping mechanism protect her, and where does it cost her? Did your reading of the device change between the early chapters and the later ones?
2. Wally’s love language is structural: “load-bearing,” “structurally sound,” blueprints and plumb bobs. Why do you think the author paired an engineer’s precision with a woman whose entire emotional life is organized around control? What does it mean that the person who finally reaches Re speaks in the same vocabulary she uses to protect herself?
3. The novel opens with Re’s marriage already hollowed out, long before Wally enters the story. How did the early chapters complicate your sympathy for Re—and for her ex? Did the “silent marriage” material change how you understood her guardedness later on?
4. Trinidad is both the site of Re’s deepest wound and her deepest healing—the place she was severed from as a girl (Chapter 3) and the place she returns to reclaim (Chapters 16–18). What did the Couva homecoming unlock in Re that New York couldn’t?
5. The sea-glass motif—fragile things shaped, not broken, by pressure—runs from the opening chapters through the final page. Track its appearances. What does it mean that the object survives the whole novel intact?
6. Liyana is a complicated mother figure: guarded, exacting, and slow to say the things Re needed to hear. Did your feelings about her shift over the course of the book? What did the sea-glass reconciliation scene in Couva earn, and what—if anything—did it leave unresolved?
7. Chapter 2 plants an unsettling image involving a childhood video and a lingering hand; Chapter 17 brings it back sharply through the mention of “cousin Shiraz.” How did you read this thread? Re names it to a therapist, and then to Wally, without ever recovering the whole memory. Did that feel like resolution, like a deliberately open wound, or like something the book still owes its reader?
8. Marcus Vance spends most of the novel as a genuine obstacle—willing to sabotage Re professionally to protect himself. How did you respond to his turn at the hearing in Chapter 19 and his graciousness in Chapter 20? Did his redemption feel earned, or did some part of you want him to work harder for it?
9. Kayden exists in the story as the “safe,” structurally sound option—reliable, kind, uncomplicated. Why do you think Re couldn’t choose him, even before Wally? What does the novel suggest about the difference between a partner who is safe and a partner who is right?
10. By the novel’s midpoint, Re and Wally have built an entire private language out of engineering terms—a way of saying “I love you” without having to say it. Did this language start to feel like intimacy to you, or like another form of avoidance? Where does the book seem to land on that question?
11. The title plays on “dam”—the levee and floodwall imagery threaded through Re’s emotional architecture—and “damn.” Now that you’ve finished the book, what do you think the title is really about: the wall Re built, the moment it breaks, or something else?
12. The epilogue closes with Re and Wally choosing not to define their future in advance—“the story wasn’t over, it was just, for now, unwritten.” Did you find that ending satisfying, given how much of the book is about the comfort of blueprints and certainty? What do you imagine for them next?