Reading Group Guide: Hum by Helen Phillips

In a city addled by climate change and populated by intelligent robots called “hums,” May loses her job to artificial intelligence. In a desperate bid to resolve her family’s debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance.

Seeking some reprieve from her recent hardships and from her family’s addiction to their devices, she splurges on passes that allow them three nights’ respite inside the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals flourish. But her insistence that her son, daughter, and husband leave their devices at home proves far more fraught than she anticipated, and the lush beauty of the Botanical Garden is not the balm she hoped it would be. When her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives as she works to restore the life of her family.

Written in taut, urgent prose, Hum is a work of speculative fiction that unflinchingly explores marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities.

Discussion Questions

May undergoes a significant procedure in the story. What do you believe motivates her decision, and how does it reflect broader societal pressures?

Discuss the role of hums in the narrative and world setting of the novel, and what it symbolizes in terms of human connection. How would you feel interacting with a hum?

How does technology and societal change affect the dynamics of May's family? Consider the role of “bunnies;” does this technology feel realistic or familiar to your world? Have you encountered discussions around children’s use of technology?

The story juxtaposes the natural world with technological advancements. Discuss how Phillips portrays this relationship and what commentary the novel offers about our future.

Examine how technology in the book impacts personal identity. How do characters struggle or adapt to technology that alters their sense of self?

May’s life is upended by a viral video. In what ways does the story address the consequences of our online lives clashing with our real-world existence? Have you experienced a viral piece of media being misinterpreted or deeply affecting someone’s life?

Discuss your experience with artificial intelligence; is it part of your daily home or work life? What benefits and shortfalls have you experienced with artificial intelligence?

What could the Botanical Garden signify in May’s life? How does its portrayal contribute to the novel’s narrative and thematic depth?

Hum dives into topics such as job loss, financial stress, and health care. Are these pressures familiar to you? How would you behave if faced with the same stresses May’s family experiences? Discuss the socioeconomic themes explored in the novel.

Reflect on how May and Jem balance parenting and their relationship; what three words would you use to describe their marriage? Do you recognize elements of their relationship in your own life? In what ways does their environment impact their marriage?

Helen Phillips includes endnotes detailing her research into artificial intelligence, climate change, and technology. Were you familiar with any of the examples or media listed? Is your experience of the novel affected by exploring these real-life examples and inspiration?

Reflect on the quote by Paracelsus included in the book. How do its details of poison and remedy relate to the story’s events and themes?

Activities

Reeling from their time in the Botanical Garden, May takes solace in baking banana bread for her friend Nova. Search online for a banana bread recipe and either bake together with friends or share during your group gathering.

Research public parks or botanical gardens in your community and plan a visit. Imagine how it would feel to be Sy or Lu visiting nature; discuss how reading Hum may influence your appreciation of green spaces.

To continue exploring the themes found in Hum, consider reading Helen Phillips’s other acclaimed works, such as The Need and The Beautiful Bureaucrat. Discuss corresponding themes in Phillips’s work, like the unique insights into humanity, society, and the individual’s place in a rapidly changing world.

Author Q&A

Tell us about the inspiration for Hum; how did the story first come together?

One evening some years ago, I was walking home from work and the thought crossed my mind that I needed to buy dishcloths. When I got home and opened my computer, dishcloths were immediately advertised to me. This made me feel eerily surveilled (but, for the sake of convenience, I went ahead and bought the dishcloths). That uncanny sensation stayed with me, though, and became part of the inspiration for Hum. Maybe it doesn’t matter if the algorithm knows that I need dishcloths, but what if that sort of consumer surveillance was taken to an extreme? This was one of the questions I set out to explore in Hum.

Your portrayal of children as characters in your work has been praised for its authenticity and voice. How do you approach writing young perspectives and dialogue?

Children contain as much complexity and dimensionality as adults. When I’m writing child characters, I always try to keep that in mind. I want to evoke their joy, their anxiety, their tenderness, their vulnerability. They deserve the same dignity as adult characters. (Also, it probably helps that I’m in the process of raising two children.)

Can you tell us a little about your journey as a writer? Did you always know you wanted to be a writer?

I am fortunate that from the earliest age when I could write a story, around six years old, I recognized how much I loved doing it. Soon after, at age eleven, I lost all of my hair due to the autoimmune condition alopecia. I gave myself the New Year’s resolution to write a poem a day, a practice I continued until I was twenty-one. Writing has always sustained me in difficult times. For a while in college I thought that I should commit myself to something more practical, but after college I admitted to myself that writing was my path, even if that meant doing other work to support it.

Hum explores parenting in a changing world deeply influenced by technology and artificial intelligence. How have you experienced technological advances in your own life and work?

The technological advances that have taken place just in my own lifetime feel quite dizzying to me. My children can’t even conceive of not being able to FaceTime with their grandparents. That particular use case seems entirely positive to me. But I also have a lot of concern about the way that our technologies can distract us and distance us from the people around us and from our own thoughts.

Did you have any favorite scenes or characters to write?

Just as the Botanical Garden is a refuge for May, it was a refuge for me. It was refreshing to write those scenes of sheer natural beauty during the strange isolated days of the pandemic (even though it does turn out that the Botanical Garden isn’t quite the simple sanctuary that May was seeking).

And, I loved writing May’s children, Lu and Sy, their unexpected reactions and non sequiturs.

The Botanical Garden is a dream setting; where did the inspiration for the utopian environment and details come from? Have you traveled to a destination that granted you the same reprieve and joy that May’s family initially experiences?

The Botanical Garden is a mashup of many places I love: the foothills west of Denver, where I grew up; Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Green-Wood Cemetery, and Botanic Garden; a certain courtyard in Taos, New Mexico.

The ending of the novel is open to interpretation; how would you like readers to understand the conclusion?

I consider the ending of each of my novels a collaboration with the individual reader. How do the reader’s own experiences and ideas color their understanding of the conclusion? I rewrote the ending of Hum countless times in order to craft a carefully calibrated ambiguity that would illuminate different plausible implications and allow room for the reader’s own interpretation.

What do you hope readers will take away from reading Hum?

The epigraph for the book is: “Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison.

The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy,” from Paracelsus (a German-Swiss physician, philosopher, and alchemist who lived from 1493–1541).

How might we dose our technologies? How might we dose our usage of our planet? How might we dose our children’s independence from us? I hope Hum raises these questions for readers.

May fights to connect with her family, with nature, and with herself in a world that seems designed for disconnection. I hope that readers might think about how they can nurture the connections in their own lives, and how we might work collectively to build a world that prioritizes connection writ large.

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio (August 6, 2024)
• Runtime: 7 hours and 10 minutes
• ISBN13: 9781797174532