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NPR's Book of the Day
In new novels, marriages are tested by a last request and a moment in the spotlight
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A
Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. Ideally, a marriage lasts a long time, but just because a relationship goes the distance, it doesn't mean things get easier in a bit. Craig Thomas, co creator of the sitcom How I Met yout Mother on his new novel, which does closely resemble his own life. But first, Ann Packer's novel Some Bright Nowhere features a long marriage that is coming towards its end because someone is dying. But she's got to ask, and it's a big one. Packer talks to NPR's Mary Louise Kelly after the break.
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The new novel Some Bright Nowhere focuses tightly on a long, mostly happily married couple. Elliot 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 and with her making a brutal request of her husband. Ann Packer is the author. She's with us now from New York. Hi, Anne.
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D
Hi.
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C
Describe the request.
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D
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, this.
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C
Struck me as so incredibly cruel. Is it? Is that the way you meant it?
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D
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.
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C
Claire, as we've noted, she's dying. Eliot, on some level, struck me as a man coming back to life, trying to figure out who was I, what's left of that man, because cancer has consumed their life for years now, been a caregiver to Claire, and that's been it.
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D
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 gonna actually be on his own and really need himself.
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C
Hmm. Is she still trying to figure out something?
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D
I think she is, but again, kind of unconsciously, she's just feeling a bit. 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.
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C
One of the things Eliot struggles with most is. 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.
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D
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.
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C
Yeah. Like, how many more steak dinners do we have here? Do I buy the fresh corn or.
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D
Not exactly. 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 based.
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C
She's always got six months to live.
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D
Three to six months.
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C
It's not funny, but it's kind of. You're like, what are we supposed to do with that?
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D
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, wow.
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C
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?
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D
I think so. To me, there's something beautiful, 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.
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C
Say more about that.
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D
Well, I think that as you walk out of the oncologist's office for the last time with a prescription for hospice, 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 Elliot, it's usually around now that people begin to understand what it's like when someone's actively dying.
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C
Ann Packer, this is your first novel in a decade, is that right?
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D
It is. Yes, it is.
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C
I will confess that I was digging around and I found an essay you wrote. This is for the New York Times. You wrote it a decade ago, 2015. And it was about what writers do between books. Right. I will 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. Success.
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D
You got me.
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C
And then you add, just kidding. We also update our websites.
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D
And that just shows you how long ago it was, because, of course, now it's our Instagram instead of our website.
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C
Exactly. So what took you so long?
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D
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. 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 surprise and delight, I got a first draft done in four months, 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.
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C
Wow. Speaking of things that are both depressing and actually really hopeful.
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D
You'Re getting a sense of my psyche here.
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Ann Packer, her latest novel is Some Bright Nowhere. Thank you so much.
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D
Thank you.
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A
As newlyweds, you hear people say that marriage takes sacrifice. But it's only really after a while where you start to tally up who is sacrificing what and how much, which is what's driving the tension in Craig Thomas new novel that's Not How It Happened. Here he is talking to NPR's Sacha Pfeiffer.
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Craig Thomas is an experienced television writer. He's co creator of the popular long running TV show How I Met yout Mother. And now he's written a novel. It's called that's not what Happened. And it's about a family of four.
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The husband has had a successful screenwriting career while his wife has been at home raising two kids, one of whom happens to have down syndrome. And because of the extra needs and extra support that is required by raising a child with a disability, she gave up her career as an investigative journalist. And now that the kids are a bit older, Emmett, who has down syndrome, he's about 24. She the mom, Paige, she's finally gotten back to writing. She writes a memoir about raising Emmett and about creating a space in the world for him. And it becomes a absolute fluke bestseller. And Hollywood comes to knock in and says we want to make this into a movie.
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Meanwhile, the dad, Rob, has seen his success fade.
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F
He's sort of going through the middle aged male ego death of like, I'm not as relevant and powerful as I used to be, which I know nothing about. Read nothing into this. I'm perfectly, I'm not neurotic at all in that way. Not at all. Please don't read into it too much. And he kind of hijacks the opportunity to be the screenwriter adapting his own wife's memoir and it almost immediately derails and this feel good movie starts to almost destroy the family it's about.
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E
And then meanwhile, this other storyline deals with Emmett, a child with down syndrome trying to become independent, another child still in high school and feeling kind of forgotten by her busy parents whose focus is on their brother, which is another great recipe for tension. So talk about that storyline.
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F
So in real life, my son Elliot, he's 18 now, he has a different syndrome called Jacobson syndrome. And my daughter Celia, she's nine and we've spent so many years in and around the disability community meeting other families, and it's just there's a way in which the child who has a disability just becomes kind of the orbit. And you try so hard to give everybody equal attention. But there are moments where the medical needs and the educational needs and all of the different challenges with raising a kid with a disability, they overshadow things. And so I wanted. This book is told from all four points of view.
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E
I really like that because not only do we get a different perspective on the same event, which gets at the book's title. That's not how it happened. But also it becomes a great device for humor. Like how her husband, when he at one point is rewriting the script, makes himself look like a hero, and meanwhile the wife felt like he hadn't really been contributing.
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F
Yeah, he takes a passage. She wrote, a very honest passage in her memoir that owns the fact that he was absent a lot and he missed a huge and very scary medical appointment when Emmett was younger that resulted in Emmett getting an open heart surgery. And when he takes her memoir and rewrites it into a screenplay, he adds himself into that scene. And she says, wait, you weren't actually there in real life? And he's like, well, the audience isn't going to like the dad character if he's not there. And she says, well, maybe the audience shouldn't like the dad character in that moment, because I kind of didn't like the dad character. Namely you. It's not a character, it's you. And so there's this funny tug of war that happens. And how do we all frame our stories? How does a family frame its story? And all four members of a family all think they're the main character in the family. Right? We all think we're the main character of our own story. And of course, bringing it back to Darcy, who's the younger sister, she feels left out of this narrative. She says, I'm barely in my mom's memoir. My mom wrote a memoir about raising Emmett, and I'm hardly in it. And that's her journey in this book, is finding her place in this family and in this world.
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E
So, as you've touched on, there are definitely autobiographical features to this book. Quite a bit of them. In some ways, I wondered if this was an apology to your spouse or at least a chance to explain yourself to your wife. Now you're at this point in your relationship. Was it that at all?
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F
I feel like it's a chance to own how complicated the journey is because this is not my family. Exactly. This is a work of fiction. These characters are different characters.
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E
There are tons of parallels.
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F
But there's a lot of my life in here. My son was born between year two and three of How I Met yout Mother, the show I co created with Carter Bayes. And we ran it all nine years. And it was an impossible amount of content to wrap our brains around at once because between year two and three, my son was born. He did need open heart surgery. He did have this rare syndrome that would result in lifelong disabilities and intellectual disabilities and challenges and therapies and what's his schooling gonna be? And so many different challenges that my wife was doing an amazing job juggling while I was running a TV show. I was in this strange position of driving from my home to work to create a sitcom. Then I would drive home into this, like, hour long medical drama that was our lives. We were in the NICU for six weeks. It was so strange to juggle those two worlds. In this book, I try to own the failings of this character, Rob, who bears some resemblance to me, who just. He felt he had to go out there and earn enough money to provide for a lifetime of, you know, supporting Emmett. And that's how I think a lot of parents like me and my wife, you know, we look at the long view and we think, how do we make this work forever for a child who might not be independent? And it's just the sheet doesn't quite fit the bed. And not everybody can be everywhere. And one person has to let go of some career things and one person has to let go of some parenting things. And the ways in which that falls short, those resentments build up and you have to at some point face them and own them, to work through them. And yeah, that was. That was kind of a healing part of writing this book.
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E
The book is very funny, I thought, but it also addresses serious societal issues, like how people with disabilities often struggle to find work because potential employers think they're not going to be good workers. So often they end up with low pay jobs doing mindless, repetitive tasks. But you write that we. Here's your quote. We're all only temporarily able bodied, so you're basically arguing for more compassion. Talk about how you wish your book would change the way that employers view people with disabilities.
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F
Yeah. In this book, Paige sees no good opportunities for Emmett after the point that all parents of kids with disabilities just globally seem to refer to as the cliff. The cliff is the moment when education ends and sort of and the structure and shape of a kid or a teenager with disabilities ends. And now you have an adult with disabilities. And it's just this like tacit thing that when you get around a bunch of parents that are like us, they will refer to that as the cliff. It doesn't matter if they're from Australia or Kentucky or England. It's just universally acknowledged that's the cliff you fall off. And the cliff is very scary. My goal with this book was to write a comedy about the cliff to make it less scary. We do not, as a society seem to have answered this question, what does an adult life look like with disabilities? And you have to be very inventive and ingenious as a parent and as a person with disabilities to find your place in the world. And that's what Paige has done in this book and the book within the book is her memoir, writing about creating that answer for her son. Right. She's trying to find what happens after the cliff.
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E
Craig Thomas is the co creator of the TV show How I Met yout Mother and his debut novel is that's Not How It Happened. Thank you.
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F
Thanks so much for having me, Sasha.
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That's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day. If you want more, you can sign up for our newsletter@npr.org Newsletter Books I'm Andrew Limbong. The podcast is produced by Clay Weiner and edited by Megan Sullivan with help from Ivy Buck. Our founding editor is Petra Mayer. The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Elena Torre, Khadil Al Salchi, Ashley Brown, Tyler Bartlett, Karen Zamora, Fernando Naraman, Jacob Fensten, Martin Patience, Christopher Intagliata, Elena Burnett, Jordan Marie Smith and Jeanette Woods. Yolanda Sanguini is our executive producer. Thanks for listening.
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Hey, Andrew here, The host of NPR's Book of the Day podcast. And yeah, I love new books, but there's just something about rereading an old favorite. On our new limited series, Books We've Loved, we're revisiting some classics, from Pride and Prejudice to Dune to Everything in between and talking about why they're worth reading today. Listen to NPR's Books We've Loved right on this podcast feed every Saturday on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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