It was the biggest moment of Ann Packer’s career, and Oprah Winfrey was on an exercise bike. She pedaled away as she announced, via speaker phone, that Packer’s fourth novel, “Some Bright Nowhere,” was her November book club pick.
“Oh my god,” said Packer. “Oh, oh, oh, oh my god.” She went on to say it several more times, and a few more after that.
But Winfrey wasn’t done. Clad in black exercise gear, feet still rotating at a sub-Peloton pace, she admitted that she’d had qualms about “Some Bright Nowhere,” which tells the story of a dying woman who chooses to spend her final weeks with two old friends instead of with her husband of almost 40 years. Claire doesn’t just want Eliot to lay low; she wants him out of the house.
“I was totally annoyed by her and her lack of empathy for Eliot through this whole process,” Winfrey told Packer. “But in spite of that I’m choosing it as an Oprah’s Book Club selection.”
This was an unusual note of reservation from Winfrey, who tends to be as effusive about her selections as Packer was gobsmacked by this one. A month later, audience members at a taping of Winfrey’s podcast were, shall we say, on the same page. One after another, they grabbed the mic to air their grievances.
“For Claire to exclude her husband at her most intense time of life, I thought was almost cruel,” said a long-married woman named Diane. “It hurt me for Eliot.”
Thando Dlomo, another reader, agreed: “Every time I had a problem with Eliot and how passive-aggressive he can be, I realized my real problem was with Claire.”
She added: “Really great book. Not a fan of Claire.”
Packer smiled through the barrage (which also contained notes of positivity). She’d been through this before.
In 2002, when Packer’s debut novel, “The Dive From Clausen’s Pier,” was a selection of the “Good Morning America” Read This! book club, viewers weighed in before a live studio audience on the protagonist’s decision to leave her boyfriend after he lost the use of his legs. One called the choice selfish. The discourse followed Packer throughout her publicity tour, cementing her belief that once books are out in the world, they belong to readers.
“It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d written another book that was going to stir up strong feelings about the ethics of my characters’ behavior,” Packer said during a recent interview. “That was a surprise.”
She added: “When I realized it was happening, I was like, it makes sense. Debate has become our lingua franca.”
Packer, 66, is wiry, warm and unassuming, not someone you’d expect to kick up controversy, but she has a certain steel. (Imagine an English teacher who doesn’t take any guff.) Of course, as any veteran author knows, books that get people talking have a better chance of bubbling up on the best-seller list, even without celebrity endorsement.
“Some Bright Nowhere” joins a mini-boomlet of books and shows about friends caring for friends at the end of their lives. Catherine Newman’s 2022 novel, “We All Want Impossible Things,” managed to be both sad and funny. FX’s “Dying for Sex,” starring Michelle Williams and Jenny Slate, was based on a hit podcast. In her memoir “All the Way to the River,” Elizabeth Gilbert recalls the death of a friend who became the love of her life. Even more recently, Lily King’s “Heart the Lover” has a third act in which friend-on-friend caregiving plays an important role (no spoilers).
“There’s this robustness around friendship,” Newman said in an interview. “There used to be concentric circles where it was you and your nuclear family, and friends were at the border. They were sort of the disposable, dispensable part of your life; you could move and make new ones.”
Since the pandemic, Newman said, she has noticed a cultural shift — an uptick in “extravagant” platonic relationships like those in “Some Bright Nowhere,” which draws its title from Christian Wiman’s poem “Night’s Thousand Shadows.”
Packer said the novel was inspired by an anecdote she heard in passing almost 20 years ago.
“A woman was at the end of her life,” she recalled, “and her husband was deemed not up to the task, so two friends moved in and took care of her. I do not actually know if he was asked to leave or if he just stayed in the study, but I heard that and thought: What was that like for him?”
After “The Dive From Clausen’s Pier,” Packer wrote a collection of short stories and two more novels. (She’d already written “Mendocino and Other Stories.”) She worked on another novel for about six years, then put it aside.
“It clobbered me psychologically,” Packer said. “I couldn’t get anything else off the ground.” She wrote 75 pages on one subject, 40 on another, but nothing clicked in a way that would sustain her over the years it normally takes her to complete a book.
Then Packer remembered the wife who asked her husband to step aside.
“Wait a minute. This is your book,” she said to herself. “Four months later, I had a draft.”
When Packer shared the manuscript with her husband, Rafael Yglesias — whose own novel “A Happy Marriage” is about the wind-down of a long union courtesy of cancer — he advised her to provide Eliot, the narrator, with a male space of his own.
Packer gave Eliot a monthly dinner club where he cooks with friends and where, it must be said, the men interact in a highly supportive, highly articulate way.
“I’ve done it before,” Packer said, of writing from a man’s perspective. “It wasn’t hard then either. I’m developing this one character and it doesn’t matter to me what gender they are.”
The book makes a subtle but important distinction between caretaking and caregiving.
“‘You always want to do something,’” Claire tells Eliot. “Men and their endless desire to fix things.” She appreciates her friends’ willingness to simply exist with her — sit, cry, laugh — rather than leaping up to complete a task.
“Caretaking is a job, like tending a house,” Lily King said in an interview. “Caregiving is a choice. It’s more emotionally involved, more generous.”
Packer hasn’t served time on the front lines of caregiving but, she said, “I’ve seen friends have cancer diagnoses and become terminal and die. I think there are very few of us in our 60s who haven’t.”
Her mother, Nancy Huddleston Packer, a writer and Stanford professor, died last spring. Packer recalled how, at 97, she bent over a laptop and typed five words that must have been muscle memory: “Chekhov is still the champ.”
Packer’s brother, George, is also a writer; his latest novel, “The Emergency,” came out on Nov. 11, the same day as “Some Bright Nowhere.” The coincidence occurred courtesy of Oprah’s Book Club, which requested that Ann’s novel land on shelves two months earlier than planned.
Because of the club’s confidentiality restrictions, Packer said, “I couldn’t tell George why my pub date had moved to his pub date for three months.”
She also couldn’t tell her adult son and daughter until the night before the book came out. (They were thrilled.)
“Some Bright Nowhere” lands at an inflection point in Packer’s career. She has a new agent and a new editor — “two amazing Sarahs,” she writes in her acknowledgments — Sarah Bowlin and Sarah Stein.
Stein, Packer’s editor at Harper, said in an interview, “For years and years, when people asked me, ‘What writers do you wish you published,’ I’d say, ‘Ann Packer.’”
When she read “Some Bright Nowhere,” she said, “it blew my socks off.” Like “The Dive From Clausen’s Pier,” the book “grapples with the fundamental question of what you owe to yourself with what you owe to others.”
Packer said: “What I’m discovering is a generation gap. Older readers are upset with Claire for wanting Eliot gone. Younger readers, exclusively women at this point, are like: ‘I love it. This is a feminist book.’”
Whether readers applaud Claire, weep for Eliot or a combination of both is not Packer’s concern.
“I love that people engage on whatever terms they want,” she said. “I did my job in terms of making a character realistic enough that you want to fight with her decisions.”
With a sly smile, Packer added, “As we used to say in grad school, if you don’t have a problem, you don’t have a story.”
Elisabeth Egan is a writer and editor at the Times Book Review. She has worked in the world of publishing for 30 years.
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