Please Love Me

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Seventeen-year-old Peyton Bound is desperate to be loved in a way that feels chosen rather than required.

Set in 1980s Shreveport, Louisiana, Please Love Me follows Peyton, whose emerging identity and understanding of love have been shaped by her mother’s intense faith and emotional needs. When Matt Adler, a brilliant young man on his way to medical school, enters her life, Peyton believes she has finally found someone who truly sees her.

But as Peyton’s complicated connection with Matt begins to fracture the defenses born of her childhood loneliness, a deeper truth emerges: She doesn’t know where the people she loves end and she begins. And that raises a question more fundamental than whether Matt loves her:

Who is she, and what kind of life does she want?

Please Love Me is a literary coming-of-age novel about first love, faith, family, shame, and the first uncertain steps toward knowing what has been handed down, imposed, absorbed—and what is our own.

1. How did your feelings about Peyton change as the novel progressed? Were there moments when you understood her choices even when you disagreed with them—or moments when she became harder for you to understand?
   
2. What does the title Please Love Me mean to you by the end of the novel? Whose love is Peyton asking for at different points in the story—her mother’s, Matt’s, God’s, her own, or someone else’s?
   
3. Peyton and her mother clearly love one another, yet their relationship is also a source of profound confusion, resentment, and pain. At one point Peyton asks, “How can I hate her when I love her?” How does Peyton’s understanding of her mother change over the course of the novel? Does understanding help her forgive, or are understanding and forgiveness two different things?
   
4. How much of Peyton’s unraveling is actually caused by Matt, and how much does her relationship with him expose wounds that were already there? Did your answer to that question change as you read?
   
5. Do you think Matt loves Peyton? The epilogue deliberately leaves that question unresolved: “He loved me. He loved me not. Perhaps we’ll never know.” What does the uncertainty add to the story? Would the novel mean something different if the answer were clear?
   
6. Peyton repeatedly struggles to understand where the people she loves end and she begins. Where do you see the clearest examples of those blurred boundaries—with her mother, Matt, religion, or elsewhere? At what point, if any, does she begin to establish her own sense of self?
   
7. Religion and spirituality shape Peyton’s life in conflicting ways. The religious framework she inherits from her mother is often associated with fear, guilt, and demons, while her own relationship with God remains a source of comfort and connection. How does Peyton’s understanding of faith change over the course of the novel? What do you make of her realization that although she can no longer meet God in church, He still “meets me where He can”?
   
8. How do Becca, Peter, and Peyton’s father function differently from Peyton’s mother and Matt? What do these relationships reveal about the difference between being loved, being needed, being supported, and being recognized for who you are?
   
9. The novel is set largely in 1980s Shreveport, Louisiana. How do the time and place shape Peyton’s understanding of sexuality, religion, family, ambition, and adulthood? Which parts of her experience seem specific to that era, and which remain relevant today?
   
10. The novel returns to certain images again and again—roads and traffic, closets, windows, storms and seasons, scars, dogs, sirens, and things that are trapped or hidden. Which image or motif stayed with you most strongly, and how did its meaning change over the course of the book?
    
11. The adult Peyton does not describe healing as forgetting the past or becoming untouched by it. Her scars remain, memories remain, and certain wounds can still reopen. What do you think the novel says about the difference between healing, closure, acceptance, and integration?
    
12. Near the end, Peyton concludes, “I will save myself.” What does that statement mean in a novel so concerned with the desire to be loved?