Ann Packer

Ann Packer is one of the most gifted chroniclers of the interior lives of women.

Her debut collection, Mendocino and Other Stories, captivated critics, but it was her first novel, The Dive from Clausen's Pier, that cemented her reputation as a writer of extraordinary talent and reach. The Dive from Clausen's Pier, winner of the Kate Chopin Literary Award and the first ever Good Morning America book club selection, stoked reader conversations everywhere ("How could she leave him?") and has gone on to become a core title for reading groups across the country.

Ann Packer's newest novel, Songs Without Words, expertly navigates the politics of a close friendship between two women and asks the question: What happens when a relationship you've treasured all your life suddenly seems broken beyond repair?

Ann Packer grew up in California and attended Yale University and The Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, The New Yorker, and in Prize Stories 1992: The O Henry Awards. She has received a James Michener Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

In addition to being a gifted writer, Ann Packer is a natural reader of her work. She has lectured on the craft of writing, the art of fiction, and developing compelling characters.

Works by this Speaker

Songs Without Words

Liz and Sarabeth have been friends forever, childhood neighbors 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 carve out a happy life for herself despite a series of volatile love affairs—their relationship remained a source of continuity and strength, a fixed point amid the tumult of their adult lives. But when an unforeseen calamity strikes at the heart of Liz's family, Liz and Sarabeth are forced to reexamine their most deeply held beliefs about their connection. What happens when a friendship you've treasured all your life suddenly seems broken beyond repair? Songs Without Words is about bonds forged in childhood and challenged decades later, about families torn by grief, about the roles women take on in their closest relationships, and about the ways in which those roles can come to seem almost as confining as they are nourishing. A stunning follow-up to Packer's beloved debut novel.

The Dive from Clausen’s Pier

How much do we owe the people we love? Is it a sign of strength or weakness to walk away from someone in need? These questions lie at the heart of Ann Packer's intimate and emotionally thrilling novel, which has won its author comparisons with Jane Hamilton and Sue Miller. 

At the age of twenty-three Carrie Bell has spent her entire life in Wisconsin, with the same best friend and the same dependable, easygoing, high school sweetheart. Now to her dismay she has begun to find this life suffocating and is considering leaving it—and Mike—behind. But when Mike is paralyzed in a diving accident, leaving seems unforgivable and yet more necessary than ever. The Dive from Clausen's Pier animates this dilemma—and Carrie's startling response to it—with the narrative assurance, exacting realism, and moral complexity we expect from the very best fiction.

Mendocino and Other Stories

With humor, wisdom and tenderness, Ann Packer offers ten short stories about women and men—wives and husbands, sisters and brothers, daughters, sons, mothers, fathers, friends, and lovers—who discover that life's greatest surprises may be found in that which is most familiar.

In the title story, on the anniversary of their father's suicide a young woman discovers that her brother may have found a "reason for living" in the love of a good woman. In "Nerves," a young man realizes that the wife he is separated from no longer loves him but that it is his own life he misses, not her. The narrator of "My Mother's Yellow Dress" is a gay man remembering his deceased mother and their vital and troubling intimacy. In "Babies"—which was included in the prestigious O. Henry anthology series—a single woman in her mid-thirties finds that everyone, including her best friend at work, is pregnant, and that their joy can only be observed, not shared. In these and six other stories, Ann Packer exhibits an unerring eye for the small ways in which people reveal themselves and for the moments in which lives may be transformed.