I go to the cemetery about twice a week. It’s a pretty place. And Ruth’s grave always has something new on it: a carved loon, seashells, vases filled with field flowers, beautiful rocks and feathers. Once when I came, a Gumby was leaning insolently against her headstone. And another time there were thin white ribbons hanging from one of the two trees, and a tiny angel on a string with her face fixed upward. Helen planted bulbs around the headstone that will bloom every spring.
And of course I do still talk to her. I make a ceremony of it: he down, close my eyes, open myself beyond opening in an effort to reach her, and to receive her. Then I start telling her things, out loud. But I never feel anything back. This pisses me off. We had a deal. To test the equipment, I ask to feel my life force. I’ve been doing this since I was ten years old, and every time I ask for it, it comes to me: I feel a hard thrill of acknowledgment pass wide through the length of me. I believe I am effectively unconscious at that moment, in a holy place between me and the Mystery. This phenomenon is beyond normality, beyond the usual understanding, I know. So when I feel it I know everything is ready for her to come. But she doesn’t. Still, I keep trying. As I promised. I am trying so hard to do everything I promised. Even when I go to sleep. These days it’s always on the side of the bed by the open window, with the drapes pulled out of the way. It’s not so I can watch the stars, as she did. It’s in case a breeze comes by. It’s so she can find me.
A CONVERSATION WITH ELIZABETH BERG
Question: In the beginning of the book, you explain to your readers that you lost a very important friend to breast cancer, and that part of the reason you wrote Talk Before Sleep was to personalize the experience of losing someone close to you. How was writing this book different from writing your other novels? Was it harder to write about something so close to your heart, or easier, in its own way?
Elizabeth Berg: I never meant to write about the experience of losing a good friend to breast cancer when I was going through it. But after it was over, I realized that although something deeply sad had happened, something truly beautiful also had. And I wanted to write a tribute to that—to the worth and salvation of women’s friendships. We are very good at denying this, but the truth is that we are all terminal. If, at the time of our deaths, we can be surrounded by the kind of love and loyalty my friend enjoyed, we will be lucky indeed.
The book was difficult to write for the obvious reason: it evoked a lot of painful memories. But it also brought back a lot of happy ones. And most importantly, it let me sound the alarm about breast cancer: it continues to claim too many lives daily, and far too little money is spent on researching ways to prevent and cure this illness.
Q: On the surface, Ann and Ruth seem like total opposites, yet these woman grow to become best friends. Are they really so different, at their core? Do you think their differences strengthened their friendship? Do you have women in your life who are very different from you, but still wonderful friends?
EB: In some ways, you could say that each woman acts out the other’s fantasies. But Ruth is wilder than Ann, braver, less concerned with what people think of her—the two are different from one another. Of course they share many of the same passions, as good friends do. And in the end, I think they want many of the same things: recognition and appreciation for the unique individuals that they are, for one thing. As for my “real life,” yes, I do have friends who are different from me, and I find it refreshing being around them.
Q: Your novel captures the pain of losing a loved one, but also highlights the humor and absurdity of everyday life. How did you manage to balance these very different aspects of the story? Was it hard for you to include humor in a novel that is, at the root, so deeply sad?
EB: I find life a mix of humor and pathos, and all my books reflect that to one degree or another. The truth is that I had a bad health scare before my friend got sick. I thought I was going to have to go through chemotherapy and lose all my hair. And I told her that when I was bald I didn’t want to wear wigs—I wanted to wear funny hats. I told her I wanted an aviator hat like Thelonious Monk wears on the cover of his album Solo Monk. I told her that I wanted her to treat me the same as she always did, to not “protect” me. I told her I wanted her to always tell me the truth. So a lot of Ruth’s attitude toward cancer and mortality is really my own. My real friend had a wonderful sense of humor, however—she was really smart and really beautiful and really funny. And her sense of humor never left her.
Q: The women in this novel are such wonderful characters. I love L.D., Sarah, Helen, and, of course, Ann and Ruth. How did you create such rich, loving characters? Are these friends like the women you know? Wish you knew?
EB: L.D. is completely made up, and I think she was put in because I was wishing for someone like her at the time. As for the other characters, some are inspired by real people, but they are all very much fictionalized. The friends in my real life do tend to be smart and funny and creative. I am lucky!
Q: The centerpiece of this novel is the strength of female friendship, but through Ann and Ruth, you also explore the complications of marriage and children. Ann and Ruth have very different husbands, Joe and Eric, and wonderful children, Meggie and Michael. How does family play into the novel? Are friends sometimes as close—if not closer—than family?
EB: I think family is secondary in the novel, except to the extent that it very much matters to both women. But the focus is mainly on the relationship between Ann and Ruth. As for who’s closer to whom, that’s a tough call. You may feel you can be yourself around your friends more than your children, for example. But if your child needs you, you’re there—your children come before your friends. I think these women understood that. They both chafed at family obligations, but they both were grounded and comforted by them.
READER’S GUIDE QUESTIONS AND
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. What were your first impressions of Ann and Ruth? Who do you identify with more? Who do you think would be more fun to be around? Who would make a better friend?
2. What did you think of Elizabeth Berg’s decision to construct her novel by going back and forth between the past and present? What did you like, or dislike, about this narrative structure?
3. How would the book have been different if Ruth was the narrator, instead of Ann? Would the story have been the same? Why or why not, and in what ways?
4. As she reflects on the male/female dynamic, Ann thinks, “The truth is, we usually only show our unhappiness to another woman. I suppose this is one of our problems. And yet it is also one of our strengths”. What do you think about this statement? Is it true for Ann and the other women in this novel? Is it true for you and your friends?
5. Berg gives us such rich, vivid, eclectic female characters. What did you make of L.D, Sarah, and Helen? How do these women, along with Ann and Ruth, interact as a group? Do they seem like women you would like to spend time with? Why or why not?
6. Ann and Ruth have many discussions about Ruth’s extramarital affairs. Ann confides that she has thought about cheating, but that she worries she would get caught. Ruth tells her, “But after the first lie, it gets so much easier. It’s disappointing, in a way, how easy it is”. Is Ruth right, does lying get easier as you go along? What do you think Ann really thinks about her best friend’s behavior? Do you think Ann would every cheat on Joe?
7. Are Ann and Ruth really so different? Ann tells Ruth, “I mean, you’re my best friend. I admire you. But we’re very different”. Do you believe her? Or do Ruth and Ann have more in common than they might care to admit? Why are the women hesitant to admit their similarities? Discuss.
8. Ann and Ruth have very different relationships with their husbands, Joe and Eric, and their children, Meggie and Michael. Discuss these relationships and how they help shape the two women.
9. After Ruth reveals a huge secret about her marriage, Ann reflects, “How can I love a woman I basically disapprove of?” Does Ann really disapprove of Ruth? Why or why no
t? Have you ever loved someone you didn’t approve of?
10. What did you think of Ruth’s decision to go stay with her brother in Florida, at the end of her life? How did her friends react? How would you have reacted?
11. This novel is unique in that we know what the ending will be before we even start our reading. Was there anything about Ruth’s death that surprised you? Were you upset by the end of the novel? Uplifted? Both?
Three women show the power
of love and the importance of freedom in
Elizabeth Berg’s latest novel
WE ARE ALL
WELCOME HERE
Available now in hardcover from
Random House and as a Ballantine Books
Trade Paperback in April 2007
PROLOGUE
Oftentimes on summer evenings, I would sit outside with my mother and look at the constellations. We lived in a small town, far away from city lights, and our skies were inky black and so thick with stars it felt as though somebody ought to stir them. I would stretch out beside my mother’s chair, and she would lean her head back and gaze upward, smiling at Orion’s Belt, at the backward question mark of Leo, at the intimate grouping of the seven daughters of Atlas. Sometimes I would pick some of the fragrant grass I lay in to put under her nose. “Ummm!” she would say, every time, and every time there was a depth to her appreciation—and a kind of surprise, too—that made it seem as though she were smelling it for the first time. When I once commented on this, she said, “Well, it might be the last time, you never know. And if you’re aware it might be the last time, it feels like the first time.” She was always saying things like that, things you needed to replay in your mind one more time. “Life is the cure for life, and death is the cure for death,” for example.
She was a bit of a philosopher in that way, my mother. She was also a bit of a psychic, skilled in reading tarot cards and tea leaves, eerily accurate in random, off the-cuff predictions. She knew lots of things other mothers didn’t: the laws of thermodynamics, how to write a song, the place for chili powder in chocolate, the importance of timing in telling a joke, how to paint Japanese anemones, personality quirks of George Washington. She taught me things about nature and about people’s psyches that have served me well my entire life.
She could also make me fear her. Until the age of eighteen, I did exactly what she told me to do—otherwise, she would discipline me in her odd way, by biting my finger, oftentimes so hard it bled. Then she would instruct me on how to disinfect the wound before I covered it with a Band-Aid. She had been a nurse—she could measure with extreme accuracy the degree of your fever by putting her lips to your forehead.
I brought her presents: wildflower bouquets, drawings and stories from my own hand, occasionally something from a store that I had saved for. I never felt the full pleasure of any accomplishment until she had acknowledged it. I was jealous of her attention to others. But I also punched pillows, pretending they were her, and talked between my teeth about her, hard-edged words full of frustration and deep, deep anger.
I played paper dolls at her feet, and she played with me. “Mine wants to go out to dinner tonight,” my mother once said. “She wants to wear the fanciest dress she has.” I held up the elegant long blue dress, the one used so often the tabs were barely holding on. “No,” my mother came complete with a white fur stole and diamond bracelet. My mother sighed and said, “Yes, that’s the one. Now light me a cigarette.” She took a deep drag, then closed her eyes. I thought I knew what she was seeing: Herself, in that dress. She pulls the generous yardage in and around her after she is seated in her date’s car, and he closes the door carefully after her—she hears the satisfying, muted click. She insulates herself into her stole, breathes in the scent of her perfume, which lingers there. At the restaurant, she orders steak Diane and asparagus with hollandaise sauce. There are gold-tipped matches on each table, and a small lamp, lit romantically. A band is playing for those who want to dance, and my mother does, right after she finishes her second dessert. She will powder her nose, then hit the dance floor and not stop dancing until the band stops and not even then for she will dance out to the car.
I did more than fantasize at my mother’s feet. I learned to read there. I drew pictures and she explained the subtle art of shading. I conjugated French verbs. I leafed through Sears catalogues, showing her what I would like to have for Christmas, and I painted both our toenails the deep red color she liked best. Once, on a September afternoon when I was six years old, I sat and listened to her patient instructions on how to tie shoes—it took an hour and a half. I was entering first grade the next day, and my mother told me I needed to know how to tie my Buster Browns. And so we sat, me saying, “This that one … no, the other one … that’s right.” She couldn’t show me how; she had to tell me. She had to talk me through everything—how to fold laundry, how to cut meat, how to make the cursive capital Q, how to sew a blind hem, how to julienne vegetables, how to fit a bra, how to apply mascara—because the only thing she could move was her head. It was funny, how often I forgot that. Almost everyone who knew her did.
In 1951, when she was twenty-two years old and nine months pregnant with me, my mother contracted polio and was for a time put into an iron lung. I was born there, my dubious claim to fame, pulled out through a “bedpan portal” alive and howling—much to the amazement of the doctor, who had prepared death certificates in advance for both me and my mother—no woman had ever delivered inside a lung, but my mother had been too ill to be taken out of it. As soon as she saw me, wrapped in a white hospital blanket, my hand (my mother insisted) reaching toward her, she rose to joy.
Not so for my father, who left when he learned my mother would not fully recover, that her only progress would be to move to a portable respirator. On his last visit to my mother, he told her that he would take care of getting me adopted out. My mother told him to fuck himself. In those words. She made arrangements to rent a house and hire a caretaker for me, and then she stayed in the lung for three years, driven to survive so that she could come home and raise her daughter as well as any other mother. Or better.
She and I lived in a two-bedroom mill house just north of downtown Tupelo, Mississippi. You know the town. Elvis’s birthplace. He had a kind of great luck and then terrible tragedy. For us, it was the opposite.
ELIZABETH BERG is the author of sixteen novels, including The New York Times bestsellers The Art of Mending, Say When, True to Form, Never Change, and Open House, which was an Oprah’s Book Club selection in 2000. Durable Goods and Joy School were selected as ALA Best Books of the Year, and Talk Before Sleep was short-listed for the ABBY award in 1996. The winner of the 1997 New England Booksellers Award for her work, she is also the author of a nonfiction work, Escaping into The Open. The Art of Writing True. She lives in Chicago.
Talk Before Sleep is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2006 Ballantine Books Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 1994 by Elizabeth Berg
Excerpt from We Are All Welcome Here copyright © 2006 by Elizabeth Berg Reading group guide copyright © 2006 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of
The Random House Publishing Group, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
READER’S CIRCLE and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1994.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76340-2
www.thereaderscircle.com
v3.0
/> Elizabeth Berg, Talk Before Sleep
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends