Book Club was born in Burlingame, California, on September 5, 1996. Sandra Yie, the book host, chose Jill Ker Conway’s memoir The Road from Coorain; the first of three volumes about Conway’s life, it recounts her childhood on a remote Australian sheep farm and how she eventually became the first female president of Smith College. Sandra remembers almost nothing about the book, except that everyone loved it—and that the fruit tart was delicious.
Tori Peterson, who cofounded Book Club with Sandra and was the home host that evening, remembers the book but not the food. Tori points to the reading selection, about a woman’s self-reliance amid adversity, as telling: “It was clear that all of us young working mothers needed time for ourselves.”
She has no idea what she served to her guests, but when she closes her eyes, one thing is especially vivid. “I remember my ugly living room furniture,” she says. “I was 32. My husband and I, it was our first house. We did not agree on the furniture.”
More memorable to Book Club as a whole was the time everyone showed up in black turtlenecks and red lipstick, as the Women of Theranos (March 2019, Bad Blood, John Carreyrou’s exposé of the disgraced tech founder Elizabeth Holmes). Dress-up evenings are always a hoot. So are themed dinners featuring foods related to characters or where a book takes place, like when Tina Crisci hosted an Indian meal complete with rose water gulab jamun cake, the recipe for which she got from her acupuncturist (November 2022, The Reading List, Sara Nisha Adams’s novel about the friendship that develops between a lonely widower and a teenage library clerk when they form an impromptu book club).
Sometimes there are guest stars. “My sister’s father-in-law, Jay Rubin, is the English translator for Haruki Murakami,” Sandra explains. When the group read Norwegian Wood (November 2001), Rubin answered questions sent ahead of time. Sometimes authors visit in person, like the novelist Aimee Liu (October 1997, Cloud Mountain), who went to Yale with early Book Club member Judy Lee.
Mostly, though, Book Club is what Book Club has been for 30 years. It hews to the structure that was established at the start: On the first Thursday of each month, the women gather from around the Bay Area—these days, the geographic distribution ranges from Oakland to Los Altos—for dinner and conversation. There’s a book host and a home host, so that no one person has to shoulder too much responsibility. “This is what happens,” Sandra tells me, “when you have super-organized women taking charge.”
This article appears in Issue 35 of Alta Journal.
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A peek at Book Club’s historical spreadsheet of titles reveals an impressive expanse of literary ground covered: more than 300 books, from Angle of Repose to Zenzele, by authors from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Isabel Allende to Abraham Verghese and Carlos Ruiz Zafón. Even during COVID, Book Club barely missed a beat before resuming meetings on Zoom (who could forget Lockdown, March 2020?).
In the perusal of other documents shared by the group—including a Venn diagram titled “Book Club Bubbles,” which describes the members’ core relationships to one another—the women themselves come into focus. There are Stanford and Harvard business school graduates as well as engineers and executives; workplaces include Clorox, Google, and the Gap. The number of active participants has been as high as 14 at times but currently sits at 8 members, all of whom have been with the club since the early days.
Other Book Club stats: The women now range in age from 60 to 64. Book Club celebrated its 10th anniversary with a trip to Las Vegas and its 25th anniversary with a kayaking weekend in Aptos, just outside of Santa Cruz. (Bonus gatherings have taken the form of spa days, camping trips with husbands and kids, holiday parties, and getaways to Lake Tahoe and Sea Ranch.) Children: Twenty-one. Grandchildren: One. Divorces: Zero. (“Remarkable, really,” Sandra muses. “Who knows if Book Club has anything to do with that?”)
Thirty years is long enough for members to have shared weddings and births and deaths, to have helped one another through career challenges, raising kids, health crises, and caring for aging parents. It’s long enough for Sandra to have done a stint as a senior dancer for the Golden State Warriors, performing with the Hardwood Classics. In March 2024, Book Club went to a Warriors home game at San Francisco’s Chase Center to watch Sandra bust a move.
“That was fun,” Sandra says. “Unfortunately, it was not during a championship season.”
On a brisk, clear evening in January, the eight women of Book Club assemble once again, to discuss Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore, a gripping climate novel about a family tasked with guarding a seed vault on a remote island near Antarctica and the mystery woman who washes ashore. It’s Tori’s turn as home host tonight. In the warmly lit kitchen, she zips around preparing appetizers inspired by the book’s setting: a beautifully presented goat cheese rolled in seeds, a platter of ceviche and chips, a small glass bowl of caviar. “I leaned hard into the seed thing and the ocean thing,” she says. As the guests arrive, each is greeted with a flurry of hugs and laughter and peppered with questions: What are you wearing? Was there traffic? What are you drinking? Is that the pinot noir from… The decibel level in the kitchen skyrockets.
Tori herds everyone into the living room—these days, the furniture, which includes a camel-colored couch and patterned armchairs, is much more to her liking—and lays out the appetizers. But first: a champagne toast to commemorate the start of Book Club’s 30th year. In addition to Sandra, Tori, and Tina, there’s Brigitte Shearer, Mary Jo Cook, Mina Katsis, Holly Cohen, and Lisa Smith. The women settle back in their seats and sigh: Who would have thought? The gatherings tend to unfold this way: a relaxed social hour to start, followed by a sit-down dinner to talk about the book.
“We’ve gotten so much better at cooking,” Sandra reflects, twirling her champagne glass. “I remember making that one meal that was way too spicy. You all were sweating through it.”
Conversation turns to Book Club’s origin story. Back in 1996, Sandra and Tori both lived in Burlingame and had young children; Sandra’s older sister, Charlene Yie Chang, who worked with Tori at Clorox, introduced them. By the end of their first lunch together, Tori and Sandra had come up with the idea. And it was right here in Tori’s living room—ringed by toddler chaos—that they sat together with Charlene and plotted out all the particulars.
Most of the women saw themselves as having been book nerds growing up, but life stage and circumstance had made them hungry for intellectual conversation and peer connection outside of jobs and families. “I probably hadn’t read a book in three years before Book Club,” says Brigitte, who at the time was starting work as an operational director at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and had three kids under the age of five. “The husbands all joke that we don’t actually read the books, but we do. We take it very seriously.”
Who was the most recent person to join Book Club? “That was me,” says Lisa, raising a hand. “I think it was ’98?” Back then, she’d been invited to join by Brigitte, but she missed her first meeting because she’d just had a baby. “It was my first child, and I was a mess.” When she didn’t show, the other women began to grumble: So is she coming or not? Brigitte was tasked with calling her up.
“I said, ‘I have a three-month-old,’ ” recalls Lisa. “And they were like, ‘So what? Us too. Just come.’ ”
The husbands and children all think fondly of Book Club. Holly points out that both her kids have book clubs of their own: “They take them less lightly than they would otherwise, because they’ve seen what ours has meant to us.” There’s a murmur of agreement. “They know it’s sacred,” Tina adds.
Time for dinner, and Wild Dark Shore. Everyone oohs and aahs over the miso-glazed salmon with roasted veggies and salad greens. At every place setting is a packet of seeds—amaranth, Egyptian spinach, red Chinese cabbage—courtesy of Tori’s husband, John, who is big into hydroponics. There’s also a nameplate resembling a library card, made by Tori and John’s youngest daughter, Brooke. (I’m tickled to find that mine is an “honorary” member card, with the issue date “9/5/96” crossed out and today’s date appended.) Once we’re all seated, Holly, the book host, unfolds a page of questions and kicks off the discussion.
She asks about the characters: Were they believable? What about the shifting viewpoint by chapter? Did it work? Would you do it differently? Tori is attuned to the Catch-22 nature of certain moral dilemmas, while Mina has a skeptic’s eye for the choices that were made: “Was that selfish, to bring the children to the island?” For Mary Jo, the shifting narrative structure was effective in propelling the action: “It felt like there was a smart mystery novel tucked in here—a whodunit.” There are questions raised about intellectual property (Would the seeds in the vault be patentable?) and ecological disaster (If the site and soil at Chernobyl, for example, wouldn’t be fully habitable for 20,000 years, would having seeds even matter?). For Sandra, so much of the novel had to do with grief: what was, what could be, the anticipation of losses to come—and how each character had a different way of coping with those losses.
As I listen to the women talk, I notice the wide-ranging discourse and the willingness to engage with the novel’s ideas and situations as if they were real life. I’m reminded of something Sandra told me during an earlier conversation, about empathy: “Reading, and what it does for you—you live your whole life, and you live other people’s lives, and it’s a rooting in empathy. To be able to grow through the characters, through the discussion.”
Book Club is constantly finishing one another’s sentences. (During Mary Jo’s recounting of one disastrous group camping trip, everyone shouts the punch line in unison: “Because there were snakes!”) Tori once described Book Club’s institutional memory by invoking Maya Angelou: “You don’t remember what you said, but you remember how it felt. That’s very poignant for Book Club. I remember sitting at Mary Jo’s table, or Holly’s, or Mina’s. The food. It takes the village to remember the details, but it is about the feeling.”
But sustaining this kind of feeling requires attention and care. A couple of times over the years, Book Club has had to come together and reevaluate: Is this still working for everyone? Are we meeting one another’s needs? A few years ago, after they’d made it through the pandemic, there was a crucial pivot point. Members had noticed that not everyone was reading the books; a lot of people were traveling again—and missing meetings as a result. Things felt different. So they sat down at Tina’s house and hashed it out.
“We’re all problem solvers; we knew what our objectives were: to connect and continue,” Tori says. They sent notes around ahead of time, and Holly came up with a one-pager: Ten meetings a year, with two special outings, and they’d keep a running list of sign-ups for hosting duties six months out. It was a declaration of intent. Since then, the ship has been steady.
Watching the women laugh and reminisce around the dessert course (including but not limited to a sea salt chocolate tart and cardamom tea), I scribble this note: “What was it if not a renewal of vows, akin to a marriage?” It was a deliberate effort to restate and reinforce the terms of their relationship to one another. That continuity means something.
A few have described the group dynamic as that of siblings. And there is steadiness and affection, yes. But unlike in many sibling relationships, there’s also a perennial sense of flexibility and adaptation. The women allow one another the grace of being able to change.
“We don’t have to watch what we say, the way we did in the beginning, when we didn’t know each other,” Tori tells me after dinner, during a moment of reflection in the kitchen. “There’s that trust and respect after all these years. People will call you out on things, but in a kind way. Like, I might disagree with you about something tonight—”
Here, Tori interrupts herself with her characteristic infectious cackle before finishing the thought.
“But I’m still going to invite you over next month.”
The loss of Charlene to cancer, in 2021, was heart-shattering to everyone. It was also emblematic of what Book Club had become.
“When my sister first got sick, in 2016, she was really private about it,” Sandra says. The cancer came back in 2019. Book Club knew. Book Club rallied. When Charlene received immunotherapy treatment in New York, Book Club traveled to spend time with her there. During the pandemic, Book Club lined up a schedule of people to visit with her, to walk with her, to prepare meals; Sandra marvels that she wasn’t even involved in those logistics.
Her sister’s passing was her first intimate death: “Your world gets smaller. You gradually home in on the most essential.” Charlene, she takes care to point out, had a lot of friends. The last circle before the family circle was Book Club.
Tori tells me a story about Charlene that involves The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and The Necklace, two books in which a group of women pass around an item that changes their lives. “Charlene loved to shop, and she’d bring things to Book Club,” Tori says. Once, inspired by The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, she brought a faux-fur coat and said, “Let’s pass it around!” People held on to it for a year at a time. On the morning Charlene died, Tori and her husband were en route to Raleigh, North Carolina, to conduct real estate business at a shopping mall. There, at a jeweler, Tori bought a gold necklace with a C on it. She returned home and, not long afterward, hosted that month’s Book Club—a tribute to Charlene.
“We each talked about a book that reminded us of her,” Tori says. “And then the necklace, we passed it around for a month before it ended up with Sandra.” The night of Wild Dark Shore, Sandra pulls me aside to show me the delicate filigreed C shimmering on her neck.
Book Club is the scaffolding, but what cements the whole thing is the dedicated effort to care for one another. Book Club has lately been rallying around Mary Jo, who was seriously injured while helping a neighbor clear a drain during a big rainstorm. “Suddenly, there was this 20-foot tree on top of me. I had to have surgery to stitch my head back together,” Mary Jo says, carefully lifting her curly brown hair to show me the scar on the side of her head; she also suffered postconcussion symptoms, a broken nose, and a compression fracture in her lumbar spine. “This group just springs into action, and it’s true for the small stuff as well as the big stuff.” Meals, visits, calls, texts, care packages, offers of help—Mary Jo emphasizes that every member of the group has experienced setbacks, but “all are made infinitely easier by the support we have for one another.”
Everyone says some version of this: There are some stretches where I don’t remember the books. It’s like a black hole. I totally missed it. Periods in which one person or another was distracted by their personal life, facing struggles, such that they couldn’t be fully present. And then there are some books where it’s like, Bam—I just look at the cover, and I can see the whole Book Club night, like it was happening right in front of me.
For these women, books are social and emotional glue. They are the conduit for a shared experience, a continuing conversation about all that happens over the course of three decades of friendship. If there’s a point of pride in this, as Mina puts it, it’s in how they show up for one another, regardless of what’s happening in their lives.
Are there books they hated? “I usually try to put them out of my mind,” says Sandra with a laugh.
No matter. Someone else will remember. Book Club may be made up of individuals, but as a group, they’re so much more, says Tori: “We fill in each other’s blanks.”•
Bonnie Tsui is the author of Why We Swim, a Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times bestseller that also was named a best book of the season by the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Outside, Discover, Amazon, Buzzfeed, and more. She is also the author of the award-winning American Chinatown; she has written about wildfires, water, and the natural world for the New York Times, California Sunday, and Pop-Up Magazine.
