A Printable Reader's Guide to True Grit

The Wild Gentleman Book Club

This printable reader's guide is designed for use at our monthly The Wild Gentleman Book Club meetings. Print it, bring it, and use it to spark conversation. For a full exploration of themes and context, see our complete Reader's Guide to True Grit.

Key Themes for Discussion

Grit That Doesn't Perform

Rooster Cogburn embodies what most of us picture when we hear "grit." But Portis is careful to make Rooster's toughness less virtue and more the residue of a hard life. Mattie's toughness is the opposite — deliberate, chosen, and entirely without swagger.

What's Owed, and What It Costs to Collect It

Mattie's pursuit of Tom Chaney is a strangely transactional way for a fourteen-year-old to talk about justice and endings. Does it make sense in Portis's telling?

The Girl Who Refuses to Go Home

Both Rooster and LaBoeuf try, more than once, to send Mattie home. She won't go. The book is, underneath everything else, about a young woman refusing to do what is expected of her.

Questions to explore:

Think of the toughest moment in your life. Did the circumstances look tough from the outside, or did it look, like Mattie's, almost unremarkable — just a series of decisions to keep going?
Where in your own life have you or do you perform toughness because it's expected?
What has it cost you, specifically, to see something through that you could have let go?
Who tried to talk you out of the hardest thing you ever finished? What did you tell yourself to keep going anyway?
Mattie has no real template for what she's doing — no other girl she can point to who's done this before. Where in your own life have you had to act without a model, without anyone who'd been there first?
How do the natural surroundings play a role in this novel? Is the setting almost another character?

Printable Version: