Songs Without Words

I reckon suicide is a hard topic to write about - realistically, that is. Nonetheless, I think Ann Packer has taken on the challenge and done well. This is one of her recurring themes, so I'm guessing she may have a personal connection with the topic. What I liked most about the book was the treatment of the parents of the girl who 'attempts suicide'. Packer gives a believable account of how the situation affects their marriage relationship but also the other important relationships of the parents - especially the mother, who has a significant and long-standing friendship with another woman (almost a sister). Also the introspection of the main characters as they all deal with their own personal histories and self-concepts is well done. show more It might appear a little stereotypical, but the difference between the father's response and the mother's response is obviously deliberate and designed to make the reader think about gender differences in american society.

It's a reasonably lengthy book - I ran about 130 km to listen to all 11 CDs - but I don't think many of those km were wasted. I also liked the performance of the reader of the audio book version I had. She had the right degree of voicing of the various characters (male, female, young, old etc), which must be a pretty hard task. I mean, it's not a *play* reading, after all. It's mostly 3rd person narration, not first person quotes. show less

So many reviewers point to how "depressing" and "boring" this book is. Although I didn't find it so, I can see the "depressing" point. I actually found it a rather hopeful story, exploring how someone can be buried in profound despair and still find a way back up to the surface.

And boring? It's certainly character-driven and most of the action is internal, but I was never bored while reading it. I was sometimes annoyed when a character made a choice or came to a conclusion contrary to what I wanted for them, but I wasn't bored. The writing was so skillful and the characters so real, I can't imagine being bored by this book.

I see the book as mainly about the reactions of three women to life. Liz is emotionally healthy and used to acting show more as the support and the voice of reason to those struggling around her. When faced with a crisis, she's forced to reevaluate her life, but she does so in a sane and healthy manner. Sarabeth had an unstable childhood due to her mother's mental illness and perceives even small events in her life as crises. She's not necessarily the owner of the depression she feels, but she's learned it from her mother and doesn't know quite how to stop it. Lauren is deeply and biologically depressed. The depression originates in her despite a loving and stable home environment.

Packer's description of Liz's "knocked off her feet but picking herself up and dusting herself off" reaction to her daughter's suicide attempt and Sarabeth's "can't get out of bed" reaction to, well, life, was an interesting juxtaposition. Sarabeth's relationship with her mother left her with this kind of learned helplessness that I suppose is somewhat pathetic. She believes that she can't possibly do anything to change or improve her situation, so she doesn't try. She relies on well-adjusted Liz to pull her out of each funk, and when Liz isn't there, it sends her into a tailspin, but it also forces her to choose whether she's like her mother or whether she can make a different choice. That's a hopeful element in the novel, although I am a little skeptical about just how fully recovered Sarabeth seems to be at the end. Can someone really make that big a shift in their lifelong thinking that quickly?

Being inside Lauren's head was just riveting to me. I felt frustrated that she couldn't just stop thinking her negative thoughts, but at the same time it was written in a way that made sense (and felt familiar): How could she possibly not think that way? How could she think those things about herself, believe them, then let them go? The answer is pretty mundane (therapy, medication), but the internal journey is what I find interesting. And I like that even when she's feeling better, there's the recognition that she's not done. She's going to be confronting these thoughts throughout her life, probably. Her task isn't to vanquish them once and for all but to develop skills to cope with them as they come up.

What was strange to me about this book is that I wasn't bothered that much by Packer's mention of the names of businesses and streets in the story. Usually this kind of name-dropping drives me nuts. I admit, I think the mention of Berkeley Bowl and Andronico's didn't further the story, but the street names I think actually enhanced the story. Maybe it's just because I lived in the Bay Area recently and the street names helped me place the characters in the world and see better where they were. Or maybe it's just that excitement of, "Hey! I know where that is! And it's in a book! I must be important!"

Perhaps it's just because I'm a boring, depressing person who gets a kick out of reading about places she's lived, but I liked this book, and I look forward to reading The Dive from Clausen's Pier. show less

Songs Without Words, by Ann Packer, is a realistic novel dealing with the interior lives of five members of an extended suburban American family during a period of prolonged psychological crisis. This contemporary Bay Area family consists of two branches. The more normal and apparently contented Palo Alto branch consists of Liz, Brody, and their two teenage children, Joe and Lauren. Across the Bay in Berkeley lives Sarabeth, the second part of this extended family. Sarabeth is Liz’ virtual sister and life-long best friend. In midlife, Sarabeth is still alone and lonely—a woman with a long history of sabotaging her long-term happiness though repeated dead-end relationships with married men. Liz and Sarabeth have been inseparable show more since their teens, when Sarabeth’s mother committed suicide and she came to live in Liz’ family while her father pursued his career and a new life on the East Coast. Their sisterly bond is strong but unhealthy. It is built on a shaky foundation of one-way mental support—it is Liz who is always on the giving end, providing Sarabeth with the constant emotional support her friend requires to maintain emotional balance.

This extended family is shattered when Lauren attempts suicide. No one sees it coming, and Lauren’s tragic action throws the entire family dynamic into chaos. Everyone flounders and struggles to regain emotional equilibrium. All their relationships are derailed—some far more than others. In particular, the relationship between Liz and Sarabeth implodes. Liz is no longer able to tend to Sarabeth’s emotional needs, and Sarabeth is too emotionally unstable to provide Liz with the emotional support she needs during this time of crisis. We watch as all the family relationships disintegrate and then slowly rebuild. By the end of the novel, most relationships have reformed along stronger and more emotionally healthy lines. It is a frustratingly slow but fascinating process to watch.

During the course of the novel, the author takes us deep into the interior lives of the five main characters—Liz, Brody, Joe, Lauren, and Sarabeth. She takes us into their minds and we observe, in painstaking and often excruciating detail, how each person navigates the psychological minefields that follow in the wake of Lauren’s attempted suicide.

The book starts and ends with the relationship between Liz and Sarabeth. But two-thirds of the book is taken up with Lauren’s descent into, and eventually out of, major depression. For me, this was the most realistic and interesting part. It is also interesting to observe Sarabeth barely clinging to sanity as she navigates the terror of living life without Liz’ emotional support. The author has a keen understanding of clinical depression, and her depiction of this process is wholly authentic and convincing.

This has been marketed as a book dealing with a derailed relationship between two close friends. I believe that is misleading. Perhaps the publishers thought it would scare readers away if they knew that this book was primarily about depressive personalities—about the interior mental landscapes of those fragile individuals genetically wired for depression, people like Lauren and Sarabeth. It is their stories that dominate the novel. The book is primarily about their disordered thought processes—about how these unhealthy thoughts work to sabotage their happiness in everyday small ways.

Make no mistake: this is a book about depression. It is effective and well done, but it is not an easy book to read. Not much happens, and what does occur…well, it is so over-the-top with mundane detail that the novel is realistic to a fault—it is a bit like what it might be to watch a non-stop unedited reality TV program dealing with a dysfunctional family in crisis. One gains a lot of insight by taking a journey like this deep into the chaotic, anxious, guilt-ridden, and often totally disordered thought processes of individuals in crisis, but the journey is wrought with frustration and as compelling as it is tedious.

Personally, I found this novel satisfying and worth the effort. I would recommend it to readers who are strongly motivated to improve their understanding about the inner workings of the depressive mind. show less

i really like her writing and i'm all for quiet books. i enjoyed this while reading it but have a feeling it won't stick with me for very long.

"She thought of how knowledge accumulated in layers rather than linearly, how you learned the same things over and over, but differently each time, more deeply. This made her think of rain, sprinkling lightly, dampening the earth and then sprinkling again and pouring down and the earth taking it in and getting wet with it, drenched with it. And then over time gradually drying out again as in old age the mind sometimes cleared itself and memories and knowledge were lost."

I so much wanted to like this book. It takes place just a few miles from where I live, deals with daughters in high school, I was completely ready to fall in love with this book. But, I found the characters whiny and could not relate to the emotional swings or depression that swamped both the teenage and adult characters.

I read this one pretty slowly; I didn't want it to end. It's not one of those books where you want to get lost in its little world, because it feels very real already. Sometimes it's the real side of life we want to escape by reading. Two characters in the book are very depressed, and their actions and thoughts are ones I recognized pretty well.

I was struck by Ms. Packer's dialogue. She has a very good ear for how people talk, to the point that a couple times I had to read passages out loud in order to understand what was really being said. That may sound like it wasn't well written ... and perhaps it was a flaw in the writing, or perhaps it was just lazy reading on my part ... but I found the story to be enriched by these details, even show more if they were a bit more challenging to follow. show less

Packer’s second novel (after 2001’s The Dive From Clausen’s Pier) is a moving meditation on the nature of friendship, love, and happiness. Sarabeth and Liz have been friends ever since childhood, with that friendship deepening after Sarabeth’s mother committed suicide while the girls were in high school. Liz has taken care of her friend ever since. Now that they are in their 40s, Liz is happily married with two children and Sarabeth is single and bohemian with a tendency to date the wrong kind of men—the married kind.

When Liz’s deeply depressed teen daughter Lauren attempts to commit suicide, everyone’s relationships are put to the test. Liz and husband Brody grow apart as each tries to deal with their own grief and guilt, show more younger son Joe stays carefully well-adjusted and quiet, and Sarabeth is plunged into the same numbing grief she felt after her mother’s suicide, rendering her unable to speak to Liz—a silence that Liz feels as betrayal. As the year progresses and Lauren’s scars—both physical and emotional—start to heal, the estranged adults around her begin to grope their way toward healing of their own and find affirmation of their deep commitments to one another. With lyrical and graceful language, Packer adroitly and movingly captures the emotions of ordinary people in crisis. show less