Songs Without Words
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
The introduction, questions, and suggestions for further reading that follow are designed to enliven your group’s discussion of Songs Without Words, Ann Packer’s riveting follow-up to her acclaimed first novel, The Dive from Clausen’s Pier.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Ann Packer’s new novel centers around two childhood friends, Liz and Sarabeth, as they navigate the challenges of their lives as adults, confront loneliness and near tragedy, and test both the limits and the redemptive power of their friendship.
Songs Without Words is a novel about friendship and about family, but it is also very much about suicide. Sarabeth remarks that Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, which she is reading at a retirement home, are not so much about adultery as about suicide. Adultery is an issue, too, in Songs Without Words, as Sarabeth struggles to climb out of the wreckage of one adulterous affair and to avoid falling into another. But suicide is the mother lode in this novel, just as it is in Flaubert’s and Tolstoy’s. When Sarabeth’s mother took her own life, which for Sarabeth was a “devastating relief,” it deepened the bond between her and Liz. But decades later, when Liz’s daughter tries to kill herself, it threatens to destroy their friendship. Sarabeth is overcome by her own pain, unable to rise above it enough to comfort Liz, and Liz is outraged by her friend’s failure. A gulf opens between them that seems unbridgeable. And for Liz and her husband Brody, consumed by solitary guilt and anger at each other, their daughter’s suicide attempt has deeply shaken the ground beneath their feet—why hadn’t they seen it coming? why couldn’t they stop it?—unsettling their marriage and dramatically altering their view of themselves and the solidity of life they’d created together.
Part of what makes Songs Without Words so deeply moving—and so terrifying—is its extraordinary level of realism, the way Packer captures both the most subtle and most dramatic emotional currents that spark human behavior. Reading Songs Without Words, one feels immersed not in fiction, but in the lives of real people. Liz and Brody and their children, Joe and Lauren, seem a typical American family, even in—or perhaps especially in—their difficulties with Joe’s soccer games, Brody’s long hours at work, and Lauren’s strange moods, all representative of the kinds of problems familiar to many upper-middle class families. What Packer shows with such devastating effect is how fragile even the most seemingly normal families can be, how easily despair can well up to engulf someone like Lauren, who in a moment of self-hatred nearly severs herself from life. But, as much as the novel examines unflinchingly the nature of human suffering, it also affirms, in writing that is as vivid and emotionally compelling as any in contemporary American fiction, the healing power of friendship and of love.
FOR DISCUSSION
- Ann Packer has been praised for the lifelike quality of her fiction. Do you feel that the friendship depicted here seems especially true to life? Do you find yourself choosing sides with either Liz or Sarabeth?
- Why does Lauren attempt to kill herself? What are the immediate and the more suppressed causes? How does Lauren herself explain it?
- Liz tells Brody that she feels completely guilty for Lauren’s suicide attempt. “I know, it sounds crazy,” she says, “but the point is: if it was your fault, then you weren’t powerless—you weren’t at the mercy of stuff just happening.” To which Brody replies: “You’re always going to be at the mercy of stuff just happening, no matter what” [p. 335]. What different ways of looking at life do these two positions represent? To what extent are they “at the mercy of stuff just happening”?
- Thinking back over her relationship with her daughter, Liz imagines herself “bowing to Lauren, acknowledging Lauren. Had she somehow failed to do that? She couldn’t think of anything more important for a mother to do” [p. 143]. Why would nothing be more important than this kind of acknowledgment of one’s child? Why does Liz choose the word “bowing”?
- After Lauren has returned from the hospital, Liz admits to Lauren that she and Sarabeth are “having some problems.” After that, Lauren occasionally asks her mother about her relationship with Sarabeth. Do you think Lauren is intentionally pressuring Liz to talk to her? Do you think it’s Lauren’s place to pressure her mother about Sarabeth?
- Liz and Sarabeth have a long history together. Do you think that, without Lauren’s attempted suicide, Liz and Sarabeth would have ended up in the same place anyway?
- Why do you think Lauren is drawn to Sarabeth? Do you think it has more to do with Sarabeth’s experience with depression and suicide, or with Sarabeth’s knowledge of art and her less-conventional life? Or something else entirely?
- Why doesn’t Sarabeth call Liz immediately when she learns of Lauren’s suicide attempt? Is her reaction selfish or merely self-protective?
- Why does Liz tell Sarabeth, “I’m not your mother” [p. 257]? Is she justified in saying this? How does it affect Sarabeth, immediately and ultimately?
- Brody describes Sarabeth as “five feet of chaos” [p. 278]. In what ways is this statement true of Sarabeth?
- What is the effect of tragedy—the suicide of Sarabeth’s mother and Lauren’s attempted suicide—occurring in such seemingly ordinary, and in Lauren’s case loving, families?
- Near the end of the novel, after Joe has won at poker, he thinks: “The cards didn’t really matter. What mattered was how you played. What mattered was your face” [p. 359]. In what ways might this apply to the lives of the characters in the novel?
- How are Liz and Brody able to repair their marriage? Why does Lauren’s attempted suicide create such anger and distance between them?
- What do you think about the hostility between Sarabeth and Brody? Do you think they would have gotten along better if not for their relationships with Liz?
- How are Liz and Sarabeth able to restore their friendship? Why is the gift of the bench so important?
- What is the turning point in Lauren’s recovery? What is it that really begins to restore her optimism and interest in life?
- Songs Without Words, though much of it is concerned with suffering, depression, and suicide, ends happily, with the restoration of Liz and Sarabeth’s friendship and Lauren choosing to embrace rather than hide from life. Why does this ending feel right? How does Packer keep the novel from achieving too easy a closure?
- What does Songs Without Words reveal about both the strength and fragility of human relationships?
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The Dive from Clausen’s Pier
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
The introduction, discussion questions, suggestions for further reading, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group’s discussion of The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, Ann Packer’s critically acclaimed and bestselling debut novel. Centering on one young woman’s conflict between her commitment to the people in her life and her duty to be true to herself, this absorbing story challenges us to look inward and to ask discomfiting questions about our relationships, our priorities, and our selflessness for which there are neither easy nor definitive answers.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Carrie Bell and Mike Mayer have been a couple forever; dating at fourteen and engaged after graduating from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, they have settled into a comfortable relationship. However, Carrie is beginning to struggle with feelings of doubt about their future. In the midst of her doubts, tragedy befalls Mike. At Carrie’s and Mike’s traditional Memorial Day picnic with friends, Mike dives from Clausen’s Pier into water that is too low, breaking his neck and falling into a coma. An anxious Carrie diligently visits Mike in the hospital, praying with their friends and families that he will wake up, knowing that he will be a quadriplegic if he does survive. But when Mike does awaken, Carrie’s initial relief is quickly replaced by nagging doubts. She avoids the attempts of her mother and of Jamie, her lifelong best friend, to reach out to her. She dreads her inevitable contact with the Mayers, and she resents the accusing looks of Rooster, Mike’s best friend, who senses her wavering commitment to Mike. Weary of her confused, hidden feelings, Carrie finally breaks up with Mike and runs off to New York in an attempt at self-discovery. Carrie’s taste of new life in New York City leads her to places in her heart and mind that stimulate and thrill her in ways she never knew were possible. But Carrie finds she cannot easily leave behind her old life in Madison, nor can she escape from herself.
Elegantly written and ferociously paced, emotionally nuanced and morally complex, The Dive from Clausen’s Pier marks the emergence of a prodigiously gifted new novelist.
FOR DISCUSSION
- Why is Carrie unable to cry until Mike awakes from the coma [p. 9, 65]?
- What effect does Rooster have on Carrie’s emotional turmoil during Part One? Is Rooster fair in his attack on Carrie outside the library [p. 85-87]?
- When Carrie and Mike see the bride and groom on TV in the hospital, Carrie thinks: “If his next words were Let’s get a minister over here and get married tomorrow, I would say yes” [p. 101]. What feelings are driving her at this point? What might have happened to Carrie and Mike if Mike had persisted in getting married after the accident?
- What does Mike mean when he says: “It was like we were already married—we’d gone too far” [p. 413]? What went wrong or changed in Carrie’s and Mike’s relationship? Did Carrie or Mike change, or did their circumstances change, or both?
- Carrie tells the reader: “For him [Mike], it was all about the future. For me, the past” [p. 77]. How does Carrie’s past inform her present? What do each of the three memories of her father mean for Carrie [p. 31]? What Carrie does not remember about her father is “nearly infinite. . . . A whole book of things, an entire encyclopedia, a volume that I tried and tried to fill at the Mayers’” [p. 31]. Might Carrie have stayed with Mike and the Mayers for longer than she would have because she was trying to fill the void left by her father? What influence does Carrie’s memory of her father have on her decision to leave Madison—and then, ultimately, to return? By returning, is Carrie escaping her father’s legacy?
- When she leaves Madison, Carrie seems to believe that people are defined by the actions or perceptions of other people. She says: “Because we were caretakers of each other’s habits and expressions, weren’t we, witnesses who didn’t just see but who gave existence?” [p. 142]. Remembering Kilroy’s touch, she says, “How extraordinary . . . that someone could touch you and make you into something” [p. 367]. Carrie’s mother asserts that “people aren’t defined by what they do so much as they define what they do” [p. 354]. Are people defined by what they do, or by how others perceive them, or by neither? Does Carrie’s opinion on this topic change by the novel’s end?
- How does Mike’s family react to his accident? How do his friends react? What about Carrie’s outward behavior in reaction to Mike’s tragedy makes her behavior so surprising to their families and friends? Are there typical or expected ways people react to tragedies like this? What do deviations from this expected behavior signify?
- Carrie explains her love for sewing: “It was the inexorability of it that appealed to me, how a length of fabric became a group of cut-out pieces that gradually took on the shape of a garment” [p. 12]. How is the process of sewing, and Carrie’s own projects with expensive silk fabrics, a metaphor for Carrie’s emotional evolution? Does playing pool have a similar meaning for Kilroy?
- Is it Jamie’s call that propels Carrie to finally return home, or is some other event the catalyst for her return? Does guilt or obligation play a role in Carrie’s decision to stay in Wisconsin? Is she trying to prove something to herself or to others? Is she acting truly selflessly? Is she settling, giving up, or being true to herself?
- Could Carrie properly be called a heroine? What would have been the heroic path for her to take?
- Carrie poses the question: “How much do we owe the people we love?” [p. 147] When she leaves Madison, she seems to view the answer as an all-or-nothing proposition: “What I had discovered was that I couldn’t give up my life for Mike—that’s how I saw it at the time, that’s the choice I thought I had to make. And because I couldn’t give up everything, I also thought I couldn’t give up anything” [p. 147]. Does Carrie see her answer differently at the end of the novel? What does Carrie give up for Mike? Did she need Kilroy in order to have something other than herself to give up for Mike? What does Kilroy owe his parents? Can love be separate from obligation? How might Jamie’s or Rooster’s or Kilroy’s definition of love differ from Carrie’s definition?
- How do the tones and styles of Part One and Part Three reflect Carrie’s different state of mind before her time in New York City and afterward?
- What is Carrie looking for in a relationship? What characteristics of Kilroy attract Carrie that were or are absent in Mike?
- Is Carrie’s resolution of her relationship with Kilroy satisfying? By “being there” in Carrie’s life, what does Kilroy teach Carrie about herself? What does Lane teach Carrie about herself?
- Is the resolution to the mystery surrounding Kilroy satisfying? Is “the tragedy named Mike” different for Carrie than for Kilroy [p. 400]?
- Why are the minor characters of Harvey (Mike’s new roommate in the hospital) and Harvey’s wife [pp. 220-221] so significant to the novel’s themes of love, obligation, and choices?
- Mike and Rooster theorize about the irony in names such as the dentist, Dr. Richard Moler, or the orthopedist, Dr. Bonebrake [p. 20]. Do the names in the novel—Carrie Bell, Kilroy, Rooster—have any ironic meaning?
- While Mike literally dives from Clausen’s Pier, who figuratively dives from Clausen’s Pier? What metaphoric images does the title conjure up for the reader before and after reading the novel?
- Envision an inverted version of The Dive from Clausen’s Pier written from Mike’s point of view in which Carrie had been the one to have had the accident. How might their lives have played out differently? What does this exercise reveal about their relationship and Carrie’s character?
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