MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
The new novel "Some Bright Nowhere" focuses tightly on a long-, mostly happily married couple. Eliot and Claire have raised two children, built two careers. By the time we meet them, Claire is very sick. The book opens with her final visit to her oncologist and with her making a brutal request of her husband. Ann Packer is the author. She's with us now from New York. Hi, Ann.
ANN PACKER: Hi.
KELLY: Describe the request.
PACKER: So Eliot's been taking care of Claire since her diagnosis eight years before the book starts. And she says that she would like her closest women friends to be in the house with her, taking care of her during her final days and weeks and for Eliot to move out.
KELLY: This struck me as so incredibly cruel. Is it?
PACKER: (Laughter).
KELLY: Is that the way you meant it?
PACKER: I didn't mean it as cruel, no. I meant it as a reflection of her deep feelings in a very scary and sad moment in her life. And in fact, when she makes the request, she does it kind of whimsically. She went through women only seeing a friend toward death herself, as one of the friends in the circle, and she found it very moving. And she wants it for herself, and she's conveying her - well, her dying wish, really.
KELLY: Ah. And Claire, as we've noted, she's dying. Eliot, on some level, struck me as a man coming back to life, like, trying to figure out, who was I? What's left of that man? - because cancer has consumed their life for years now. He's been a caregiver to Claire, and that's been it.
PACKER: Right. And I think, in a way, you could look at her request as entirely unconscious on her part, but aimed at helping Eliot find himself in these final days before he's going to actually be on his own and really need himself.
KELLY: Is she still trying to figure out something?
PACKER: I think she is but, again, kind of unconsciously. She's just feeling a - what does she want? What would be the way to go through this unthinkable process of dying? It turns out late in the book that she had other reasons for wanting him gone, but that's something that the two of them have to kind of work their way towards, together and apart.
KELLY: One of the things Eliot struggles with most is the uncertainty of not knowing how much time they have left together. He keeps calling the hospice nurses and bugging them for answers, like, do we have days? Do we have weeks? Do we have months? And their answer is the honest one, we don't know. That felt so human to me.
PACKER: I think it's so hard. In a death from an illness like cancer, you know it's coming and you can't control that at all. The idea that you can get a bead on how long you have is very powerful. In a way, it gives you something that you can't exactly control, but that you can control your reaction to it. So for him, if they tell him six months, then that allows him to sort of construct the near future in one way.
KELLY: Yeah. Like, how many more steak dinners do we have here?
PACKER: Right. And if they say...
KELLY: Do I buy the fresh corn or not?
PACKER: Exactly. And if they say, you know, it's probably about seven days, well, then you're thinking completely differently. And he just wishes he could know. And he's very frustrated when not only do they not know, but they keep somewhat casually revising the estimate...
KELLY: Right.
PACKER: ...Based...
(LAUGHTER)
KELLY: She's always got six months to live.
PACKER: Three to six months.
KELLY: It's not funny, but it's kind of - you're like, what am I supposed to do with that?
PACKER: Exactly. Exactly. Is it one to three months or three to six months? And at what point in either of those windows is it really going to be?
KELLY: Yeah. I have lost a loved one to cancer. Many people listening, I'm sure, have. It's incredibly depressing. As you wrote this, you let us sit with the sadness of it. Did you also manage to find something beautiful, hopeful along the way?
PACKER: I think so. To me, there's something beautiful in the intimacy and the truth of what this couple and their children and friends get to at the end of the book. It's a journey everybody's going to go on, one way or another. And in a way, what I hope happened to them in the book was that, in some way, the prospect became more real and less terrifying.
KELLY: Say more about that.
PACKER: Well, I think that as you walk out of the oncologist's office for the last time with a prescription for hospice...
KELLY: Right.
PACKER: ...You're basically being told, this is it, six months. It's unfathomable at that point. But as you go through the days, the weeks, possibly the months, you discover that in a way, dying is more of the same until it isn't. And I wanted to sort of pause at the point in the book where I think one of the hospice workers says to Eliot, it's usually around now that people begin to understand what it's like when someone's actively dying.
KELLY: Ann Packer, this is your first novel in a decade - is that right?
PACKER: It is, yes.
KELLY: It is. I will confess that I was digging around and I found an essay you wrote. This was for the New York Times. You wrote it a decade ago - 2015 - and it was about what writers do between books.
PACKER: (Laughter) Oh, right.
(LAUGHTER)
KELLY: We'll quote you. Quote, "novelists do all kinds of things as they wait for their books to be published, from imagining unforeseen commercial success to imagining unforeseen commercial success" (laughter).
PACKER: You got me.
(LAUGHTER)
KELLY: And then you add, just kidding. We also update our websites.
(LAUGHTER)
PACKER: And that just shows you how long ago it was because, of course, now it's our Instagram...
KELLY: Yeah.
PACKER: ...Instead of our websites.
KELLY: Exactly. Exactly. So what took you so long?
PACKER: You know, I was working on a different book for a lot of that time. I had a book that I started shortly after the last one came out, and it was very complicated structurally. And I wrote it and wrote it and wrote it and wrote it, and I just couldn't get it to the right place. And it was very depressing, and it actually caused me to have a hard time finding something different to work on. Then I thought about working on this, and to my, you know, surprise and delight, I got a first draft done in four months...
KELLY: Wow.
PACKER: ...Which is unheard of for me. So I got through the long process of working on something that didn't work, only to find that there was still a way to get something done that did work.
KELLY: Wow. Speaking of things that are both depressing and actually really hopeful. It...
(LAUGHTER)
PACKER: You're getting a sense...
KELLY: Yeah.
PACKER: ...Of my psyche here (laughter).
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KELLY: Ann Packer - her latest novel is "Some Bright Nowhere." Thank you so much.
PACKER: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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