Encourage readers to connect the book’s themes and characters with their personal experiences.

1. Share your emotional reactions to the revelations regarding Miles Archer’s past. How did the flashbacks to Miles’s traumatic experiences add nuance to your understanding of his character and his relationship with Elizabeth Tate Collins in the present?

2. Miles and Tate become involved by happenstance. How does the inception and evolution of their relationship compare and/or contrast with your own romantic experiences? Do you think their dynamic would differ if they’d met in an alternate context?

3. Compare and contrast Tate’s and Rachel’s characters. Which character did you find most relatable or believable? Whose experience do you relate to more, and why?

4. Tate’s and Miles’s relationships with Tate’s brother Corbin inform their romantic dynamic. What role does Corbin play in their affair? Does Tate, Miles, and Corbin’s complex dynamic resonate with your own experience? Why or why not?

Examine the book’s relevance to societal issues, historical events, or cultural themes.

1. Using Miles’s storyline, the novel explores how past trauma can influence present relationships. Explore how Miles’s state of mind relates to his history with Rachel and Clayton. How does Hoover incorporate elements of loss and grief into a story about love and redemption?

2. The novel is primarily set in California. Examine the role this setting plays in the novel’s overarching mood and the characters’ personal growth journeys. How would the narrative differ if set in an alternate location?

3. Ugly Love explores the entanglement of pleasure and pain. What imagery and/or symbolism does Hoover use to enact this notion? How do Tate’s and Mile’s relationships with pleasure and pain relate to their sexual preferences and modes of self expression?

Dive into the book’s structure, characters, themes, and symbolism.

1. The novel alternates between scenes in the past and scenes in the present. Discuss the narrative and thematic effects of this formal choice. How do these parallel timelines interact and create tension and depth?

2. Miles’s first-person point of view contrasts with the third-person point of view sections. How do Miles’s portions of the narrative function? What is the tone, mood, and style of his chapters, and how does his perspective reveal his characterization?

3. Hoover uses water imagery throughout Ugly Love. Identify specific examples of water imagery throughout the novel and discuss their symbolic and thematic significance. How would the novel’s themes resonate differently without these allusions?

4. Hoover uses repeated images of doors and doorways. Examine the symbolic resonance of this recurrent imagery. What aspects of the novel’s emotional and relational experiences do doors and doorways enact?