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    Songs Without Words
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    Songs Without Words
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    Songs Without Words
    Audiobook14 hours

    Songs Without Words

    Written by Ann Packer

    Narrated by Cassandra Campbell

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Ann Packer's debut novel, The Dive from Clausen's Pier, was a nationwide bestseller that established her as one of our most gifted chroniclers of the interior lives of women. Now, in her long-awaited second novel, she takes us on a journey into a lifelong friendship pushed to the breaking point.

    Liz and Sarabeth were childhood neighbors in the suburbs of northern California, brought as close as sisters by the suicide of Sarabeth's mother when the girls were just sixteen. In the decades that followed-through Liz's marriage and the birth of her children, through Sarabeth's attempts to make a happy life for herself despite the shadow cast by her mother's act-their relationship remained a source of continuity and strength. But when Liz's adolescent daughter enters dangerous waters that threaten to engulf the family, the fault lines in the women's friendship are revealed, and both Liz and Sarabeth are forced to reexamine their most deeply held beliefs about their connection.

    SONGS WITHOUT WORDS is about the sometimes confining roles we take on in our closest relationships, about the familial myths that shape us both as children and as parents, and about the limits-and the power-of the friendships we create when we are young.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateSep 4, 2007
    ISBN9780739354698
    Unavailable
    Songs Without Words
    Author

    Ann Packer

    Ann Packer is the acclaimed author of two collections of short fiction, Swim Back to Me and Mendocino and Other Stories, and two bestselling novels, 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 appeared in The New Yorker and in the O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies, and her novels have been published around the world. She lives in San Carlos, California.

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    Reviews for Songs Without Words

    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      Sarabeth's mother killed herself when Sarabeth & Liz were 16. The book takes place when they are adults. Liz's daughter is depressed, and her daughter's suicide attempt strains both Liz's marriage and her friendship with Sarabeth.

      It's partly about sisterhood/friendship, partly about depression, partly about communication, partly about family relationships.

      A slow-paced book, but not bad.
    • 4/5
      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 if they were a bit more challenging to follow.
    • 4/5
      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 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.
    • 2/5
      After Packer's debut novel (The Dive from Clausen's Pier, which I enormously loved and HIGHLY recommend), I was really looking forward to reading this book (her third book, second novel). What a disappointment.The story starts with Liz and Sarabeth as adolescents. They live near each other and their relationship is like that of sisters, owing in part to Sarabeth's mother's suicide.The novel quickly flashes forward to the pair in their adult life. Sarabeth is single and has become estranged from the married man with whom she was having an affair. Liz is now married with a teenaged daughter (Lauren) and a son several years younger than Lauren (Joe). It soon becomes painfully obvious that Lauren is depressed and she attempts to kills herself.This tests the relationship between Liz and Sarabeth, as the jacket copy promised. But it was in really ridiculous ways. To go into it further would spoil the utterly incompetently written book, but I'll say that it was as if the author tried WAY too hard to go out of her way to be unpredictable. But then she failed by ending the book in a completely predictable way, so I'm not sure why she wasted my time with those 300 pages in the middle.Plus, it annoyed me that this book had a Lorelei, Lauren, and Liz, and Joe and a Jim, and a handful of other alliterative names. How difficult is it to come up with OTHER names? Throw me a Ralph or a Zelda!I really hope her third novel returns to "Clausen's Pier"-level of writing.
    • 5/5
      So detailed---almost painful in the completeness of the emotional descriptions, but I loved all of it. At some points you can feel every single movement a character is making, almost every breath. I was listening to the audio version---I'm not sure if I would have appreciated the moment by moment descriptions quite so much if I had been holding a book in my hands---maybe if I were speed reading (!).
    • 2/5
      Dull, dull, dull . . . I read this whole book, but I really wanted to skip ahead hundreds of pages to get to the end and start something that held my attention better. . . . none of the characters grew throughout the course of the novel, and there wasn't an exciting plot to compensate.
    • 3/5
      Good, not great read- very forgettable. I found it hard to care about most of the characters, and felt that the sexual scenes and dream descriptions were unnecessary. The book probably would have been better if told from fewer characters' points of view. I also thought Sarabeth's descent into depression and re-emergence was a bit unbelievable, though I would have liked to hear more about her mother, or her and Liz's younger years
    • 3/5
      Sometimes a bit tedious, but a realistic portrayal of the effects of depression in family relationships. Interesting, but not as interesting a story as The Dive from Clausen's Pier.
    • 3/5
      This one was just okay. The beginning of the story was somewhat confusing. I did not feel Sarabeth and Liz had a strong friendship and maybe this is something they did not realize either. This was not a page turner although it held enough of my interest to want to read until the end.
    • 3/5
      A rather mundane novel about two forty-something friends, one married with a suicidal daughter and one an arty free-spirit. I'm not sure I would have finished the book had I not been on vacation.
    • 4/5
      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, 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.
    • 3/5
      Packer does a commendable job pointing out that long-term suffering can result as an aftermath of suicide. Sarabeth lost her mother as a teenager, and a deep depression emerges many years later when her best friend's daughter is going through a rough time in her life. Unresolved grief can be tricky like that. The reader is made privy to the thoughts of the characters. Sometimes these thoughts can be trivial, but often they are the dark thoughts of a mind teetering on the edge of sanity. I thought the themes of grief and despair were well-developed and made the book worthy of the quick read that it was. I found some of the peripheral stories about old boyfriends, etc. distracting from the heart of the story.
    • 3/5
      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 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.
    • 4/5
      A daughter's attempted suicide sends shock waves through her mother's relationship with her oldest friend, whose mother committed suicide when she was a teen.
    • 3/5
      After reading her first book, The Dive From Clausen’s Pier, it’s not surprising to find that this is a somber, serious book that is carefully paced and full of small details. The story examines relationships – those we have with our family members, those we have with friends and even those we might have with casual acquaintances or therapists. We learn in the prologue that Sarabeth’s mother is “gone” (as is her father, but he’s secondary to the story) and she’s living with her best friend’s, Liz’s, family, across the street from her own home. The story then jumps to the present when Liz and Sarabeth are both grown and still best friends but lead vastly different lives. Sarabeth is barely hanging on after the end of a long adulterous affair and Liz’s daughter Lauren has tried to kill herself. As each of their lives begins to unravel Packer takes us through the quotidian elements of their days and exposes their interior emotions and thoughts with a precise and delicate touch.
    • 3/5
      Ann Packer has a way of digging into the emotional depths of her characters, sometimes to the point that it becomes draining. While I enjoyed the book overall, it isn't an easy book to get through.
    • 4/5
      Not much action, but an interesting read that delves into the impact of both major an miniscule occurences on our outlook of life. A Dive From Clausen's Pier was way better, but this is better than your average novel.
    • 3/5
      Excellent depictions of the experience of depression and the author seems to understand the value of friends and caring family and the price they pay for being close to those who are depressed. Ultimately a hopeful book, but not one I'd recommend to just anyone. Seems like something Oprah would pick up.
    • 5/5
      I like her writing! Very emotional and realistic.
    • 5/5
      "Life in slow-motion" would be a good subtitle for this novel. If you get bored easily, don't start. But once you get used to Packer's painstaking style of describing everyday details in every scene, you start to appreciate the way life's lessons are extracted from these seemingly mundane minutiae.