Ann Packer’s Some Bright Nowhere offers up the quiet, devastating drama of a couple under pressure as Claire, who is dying after a nine year struggle with cancer, asks her husband Eliot to step aside and let her friends care for her in her final days. Some Bright Nowhere was selected as an Oprah Book Club Pick. “This beautifully written story is going to get you thinking about some things that really matter,” says Oprah. Packer shares her journey as a writer and how she found the courage to tell this powerful story.
AUTHORLINK: Tell me about your apprenticeship as a creative writer. Did you have a mentor who offered advice that you can share with us?
PACKER: I took the standard MFA route, which gave me time and space to focus on the craft of writing fiction. I think the single most important thing I learned was from Jane Smiley, and to call what she told us “advice” really doesn’t do it justice. She ran what she called “Short Story Boot Camp,” a workshop in which each student did four drafts each of two different stories. It was, obviously, a class about revision, but even more it was a class about the writer’s attitude toward her work. Before that class I had a much more rigid view of what it meant to write a story, and what I wanted from early readers. (This is overstating it by a lot, but a student of mine once said: “All you really want from workshop is to walk into the room and have everyone stand up and applaud.”) Before Jane’s class I looked at the stories I wrote and brought to workshop as attempts to do something good right then, rather than as the start of a long process that would and should involve many, many drafts.
AUTHORLINK: James Dickey said the idea for Deliverance came to him as a vision of a man standing alone on top of a mountain. His job was to get the man off the mountain. Where did the idea for Some Bright Nowhere come from?
PACKER: Many years ago, I heard an account of a woman nearing the end of her life. Her husband had been deemed inadequate to the task of caring for her during her final days, so her closest women friends moved in to take care of her in his stead. The story stayed with me, maybe even nagged at me. I understood the appeal—even the logic—of women doing the caretaking. It was easy to imagine women surrounding a dying friend with love and care, finding ways to ease her discomfort and escort her not just physically but also emotionally to her end. But the idea took for granted not just that women are caretakers but also that men are not. There’s historical
truth to this notion, but it also has the power to get in the way of other possibilities. What about the husband in this scenario? Would he be relieved to be replaced, or devastated? Would he become bitter? Would he stay away? How would it affect his view of the marriage, both immediately and in the longer term? These questions animated my writing of Some Bright Nowhere, as did a general and abiding interest in how we behave under intense emotional pressure. As each of my characters got closer to the wife’s death, I wanted to explore which truths and desires would remain, and which would fall away.
AUTHORLINK: Your sweet spot as a writer is writing with insight and tenderness about the impact of disability and illness on relationships. What draws you to write about this?
PACKER: I always want to write about characters who are under a lot of pressure, as I suggested in the previous response. Perhaps because my father had a debilitating stroke when I was a child, the kind of pressure that befalls people when their loved ones become ill has always struck me as among the most difficult of pressures. There are many different ways to deal with such events and circumstances, and I think the way each person behaves in such situations reflects central truths about their psyches. Put them into conflict or even just disagreement with each other over how to cope, and any number of dramatic possibilities emerge.
AUTHORLINK: Your depiction of Claire’s terminal illness and what the hospice workers in the book call her availability and unavailability matched my own experience of caring for a terminal parent. Talk about the research and/or personal experience that went into writing this.
PACKER: First, I’m sorry you went through that! It’s so hard. Being in my 60s, I’ve seen a number of friends with cancer diagnoses, two of whom became terminal and died. My involvement with these friends and their families was in no way “research,” but it helped furnish my sense of what this kind of prolonged grief is like, and the way that the challenges ripple outward from the person with the illness, to her family, to her friends, and so on. The challenges but also, I should say, the moments of profound and thus beautiful intimacy.
AUTHORLINK: Critics have mentioned your ability to write about ordinary grace. Talk about the role of the mundane and small, ordinary moments in stories about topics as large as end of life care.
PACKER: “Ordinary grace” is a nice phrase, but it makes me wonder: doesn’t most grace arise from ordinary moments? I don’t know. I’m raising it more to ponder than to try to answer your question. I think my project, if that’s not too grandiose a way to term my ongoing preoccupations as a fiction writer, is to find drama in the everyday. I think the “topic” of end of life care is large, but the way it plays out in a small group of people is the epitome of ordinary. Flannery O’Connor said, “Anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his life.” And Eudora Welty said, “Write about what you don’t know about what you know.” I think
both O’Connor’s truth and Welty’s advice are at play in everything I write.
AUTHORLINK: Without offering any spoilers, how did you decide where to end the book?
PACKER: I always knew it would end where it ends, so it’s hard to say how I decided. I just knew. I don’t think it could end anywhere else, but that’s just another way of saying it felt right. Sorry not to be more expansive!
AUTHORLINK: What was your greatest challenge in developing Some Bright Nowhere?
PACKER: Confidence. There was an earlier (as-yet-unpublished) novel that I wrote and rewrote and rewrote, stretching over I think about six years. It had a complicated structure, which contributed to the difficulties. I eventually did what you’re supposed to do when a project isn’t working out, which is try something else. And I did that four or five times, each time flagging within 20-40 pages (or in one case 80). I began to really worry that I wouldn’t be able to write another novel. So when I started Some Bright Nowhere, my biggest question was whether it worked at all. I really wasn’t sure until I’d written the full first draft that I had something I might someday (after plenty of revision!) publish.
AUTHORLINK: What advice do you offer apprentice writers about craft, staying encouraged in the face of rejection, or both?
PACKER: I don’t have any advice about staying encouraged. I just think it’s very, very hard, and you have to really want or possibly need to write for it to make sense to keep going. About craft, my response will be no surprise after my answer to your earlier question. It’s not so much “Revise, revise, revise” as “Expect to revise. Plan on revising. Be willing to change anything and everything to find your way to the best possible version of your story or novel.”
AUTHORLINK: Discuss what you are working on now.
PACKER: It’s far too soon! Do I mean to discuss it or to be working on something now? I’ll never tell.
In addition to her novel Some Bright Nowhere, Ann Packer is the author of three bestselling novels: The Children’s Crusade, Songs Without Words, and The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, which received the Kate Chopin Literary Award among many other prizes and honors. Her short fiction has been published in two collections — Mendocino and Other Stories and Swim Back to Me — and includes stories that appeared in The New Yorker and in the O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies. Ann’s work has been translated into over a dozen languages and published around the world.
