We’re holding our second winter book club with an online meetup on January 10. Sign up on Team Snap to join us.

We’ll discuss Dinners with Ruth by Nina Totenberg.

Discussion questions

• What did you think of the book?
• How do you think the era when Nina Totenberg started working influenced her feelings about female friends?
• What do you think motivated Nina Totenberg to write the book?
• Is there anything that surprised you about the book?
• What did you enjoy most about the book? What did you like least?
• What did you learn about how the Supreme Court works?
• What do you appreciate about how the Supreme Court works?
• How do you think Nina Totenberg’s friendships change the way she lives and thinks?
• Socially, Nina Totenberg’s personal interactions with friends seem to happen over dinner. Do you have frequent dinners with friends? How do you maintain friendships?
• Nina Totenberg’s friendships initially seem to be related to meeting through professional work. Do you think friendships forged through work-related interests are the same as friendships forged through other means?
• How has this book caused you to reflect on your friendships with others throughout your life?

Summary

Four years before Nina Totenberg was hired at NPR, where she cemented her legacy as a prizewinning reporter, and nearly twenty-two years before Ruth Bader Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court, Nina called Ruth. A reporter for The National Observer, Nina was curious about Ruth’s legal brief, asking the Supreme Court to do something revolutionary: declare a law that discriminated “on the basis of sex” to be unconstitutional. In a time when women were fired for becoming pregnant, often could not apply for credit cards or get a mortgage in their own names, Ruth patiently explained her argument. That call launched a remarkable, nearly fifty-year friendship.

Dinners with Ruth is an extraordinary account of two women who paved the way for future generations by tearing down professional and legal barriers. It is also an intimate memoir of the power of friendships as women began to pry open career doors and transform the workplace. At the story’s heart is one, special relationship: Ruth and Nina saw each other not only through personal joys, but also illness, loss, and widowhood. During the devastating illness and eventual death of Nina’s first husband, Ruth drew her out of grief; twelve years later, Nina would reciprocate when Ruth’s beloved husband died. They shared not only a love of opera, but also of shopping, as they instinctively understood that clothes were armor for women who wanted to be taken seriously in a workplace dominated by men. During Ruth’s last year, they shared so many small dinners that Saturdays were “reserved for Ruth” in Nina’s house.

Dinners with Ruth also weaves together compelling, personal portraits of other fascinating women and men from Nina’s life, including her cherished NPR colleagues Cokie Roberts and Linda Wertheimer; her beloved husbands; her friendships with multiple Supreme Court Justices, including Lewis Powell, William Brennan, and Antonin Scalia, and Nina’s own family—her father, the legendary violinist Roman Totenberg, and her “best friends,” her sisters. Inspiring and revelatory, Dinners with Ruth is a moving story of the joy and true meaning of friendship.