From Library Journal
The subject of women's friendships in the face of death is sensitively handled in Berg's ( Durable Goods , LJ 4/15/93) second novel. Conventional and quiet, Ann Stanley never had a true best friend until she met the beautiful and outgoing Ruth Thomas. Over the years, their friendship deepens and enriches them both. Then Ruth is diagnosed with rapidly metastasizing breast cancer. During the period of Ruth's dying, a small group of women, along with Ann, share Ruth's doctor visits, help make funeral plans, and enjoy late-night lobster feasts together. They talk about men, children, sex, the future, and the past. They weep, laugh, analyze, and try to console one another. Never preachy or maudlin, this novel is utterly convincing. All the conversations ring true; all the emotions are recognizable and real. Many women will be able to identify with the subject matter of this novel, which should guarantee it a well-deserved readership. Highly recommended for all public libraries.
- Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Berg has written another perfectly constructed and tender novel. Her first, Durable Goods , was a particularly lyrical coming-of-age story. This is a particularly sensitive coming-to-terms-with-death tale, as well as a novel about friendship among women. In a brief prologue, Berg tells us that she lost a dear friend to breast cancer, and, clearly, her novel is a form of healing as well as a call for more research into the causes and prevention of breast cancer. Having said that, we must also say that this is a supple and subtle novel free of any didacticism or mawkishness. Berg's gentle narrator, Ann, sets the tone as she carefully, even ritualistically, describes the final days of her best friend. Ruth is a beautiful and vital woman who has attained an amazing level of serenity in the midst of the pain and ravagement of cancer. Ann puts her own life on hold to be with Ruth, feeding her rich, indulgent meals (when she can eat), bathing her, keeping her apartment bright and cheerful, sharing memories and confidences. She is joined in the watch by a trio of friends who relieve the tension with humor and abrupt little squabbles sparked by jealousy and fear. Life surely goes on, Berg seems to say, but we do miss our dead. Donna Seaman
From Kirkus Reviews
Berg (Durable Goods, 1993) offers a sappy tale about a woman witnessing the death of her friend from breast cancer. Ruth is a 43-year-old artist whose cancer metastasizes to her brain, her lungs, her kidneys, so that it's only a matter of time, ``weeks to months, depending on what `fails' first.'' Ruth has around-the-clock surveillance from a group of close women friends, the most important of whom is her best friend, Ann. Ann has virtually abandoned her family to share these remaining days with the only person she has ever really been able to get close to, and during this vigil she recounts their history. It turns out that Ann's life looks much like Ruth's when they first meet. Both are married, both have a child, both are unhappy, both want out. But it is Ruth who gathers the courage to leave her cold and unsympathetic husband, get her own apartment, and make a fresh start. And Ann envies her until she stays over at her place one night, discovers a perfectly ordered underwear drawer, and decides that it is ``not an obsessive kind of neatness, but loneliness,'' and goes home. This conclusion seems based on fear--because Ann can't yet make that same leap. But when Ruth, on the next page, reveals that she wants to go back to her horrible husband, the weakness of these women, in a book that purports to be about women offering each other strength, proves too unbelievable. Ultimately, Ruth does die, and when Ann returns to a husband who has the compassion to ask things like ``do you have any idea how long this might take?'' as Ruth gasps for breath in the other room, we're left wondering why Ruth bothers to say ``don't wait anymore...seize the moment.'' Sentimental, disappointing. All talk. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"You'll want to give a copy to every good woman friend you have." -- The Charlotte Observer
"Entertaining, finely crafted Elizabeth Berg tackles serious issues with grace" -- San Francisco Chronicle
"Tender and irreverant by turns, it offers mature intelligent and buoyant spirit, like a very good friend." -- Houston Post
From the Paperback edition.
From the Publisher
What do women talk about when they know they don't have forever? They talk about what they have always talked about, only they go deeper and more honest: with outrageous humor they try to mitigate pain. Intimate and uncensored sharing, the kind of connection women prize, is at the heart of this deeply moving novel about the grit and power of female friends.Ann and Ruth have always talked as only great friends can--honestly, and about everything: husbands and marriages, sex lives and children, their work, their hopes, their disappointments, and their dreams. For Ann, cautious and conventional, her closeness to the outspoken and eccentric Ruth brings about discovery and liberation, a chance to say whatever she wants, and, most important, under the insistent tutelage of Ruth, to become herself. Over the years, the women have shared recipes, quilting patterns, child care, delicate and dangerous secrets. Each rests secure in the knowledge that they will be friends forever. Then something happens that will change their lives forever, and the women begin to share something more profound than either of them might have predicted.
Written with an unerring ear for how women talk, laugh, and cry together, and with a gift for capturing the uniqueness of personality, Talk Before Sleep is sure to find a place in readers' hearts.
From the Inside Flap
"Until that moment, I hadn't realized how much I'd been needing to meet someone I might be able to say everything to."
They met at a party. It was hate at first sight. Ruth was far too beautiful, too flamboyant. Not at all Ann's kind of person. Until a chance encounter in the bathroom led to an alliance of souls. Soon they were sharing hankies during the late showing of "Sophie's Choice," wolfing down sundaes sodden with whipped cream, telling truths of marriage, mortality, and love, secure in a kind of intimacy no man could ever know. Only best friends understand devil's food cake for breakfast when nothing else will do. After years of shared secrets, guilty pleasures, family life and divorce, they face a crisis that redefines the meaning of friendship and unconditional love.
From the Paperback edition.
From the Back Cover
"You'll want to give a copy to every good woman friend you have." -- The Charlotte Observer
"Entertaining, finely crafted Elizabeth Berg tackles serious issues with grace" -- San Francisco Chronicle
"Tender and irreverant by turns, it offers mature intelligent and buoyant spirit, like a very good friend." -- Houston Post
From the Paperback edition.
About the Author
Elizabeth Berg is the New York Times bestselling author of many novels, including The Year of Pleasures, 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 body of work, Berg is also the author of a nonfiction work, Escaping Into the Open: The Art of Writing True. She lives in Chicago.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
This morning, before I came to Ruth's house, I made yet another casserole for my husband and my daughter. Meggie likes casseroles while Joe only endures them, but they are all I can manage right now. I put the dish in the refrigerator, with a note taped on it telling how long to cook it, and at what temperature, and that they should have a salad, too.
Next I did a little laundry--washed Meggie's favorite skirt, then laid it on top of the dryer and pressed the pleats in with the flat of my hand. I love doing this because I love the smell of laundry soap and the memory it brings of lying outside on warm days, watching my mother peg huge white bedsheets onto the clothesline. Those sheets glowed with the light blue color white clothes radiate when they are extremely clean. My mother seemed to be fighting with them sometimes, muttering at them as best she could through the wooden clothespins she held in her mouth, insisting that they stay anchored in one place while they pulled and yanked to be free, their wet snapping sounds a protest. I always thought maybe we should let them go. Maybe they had a mission. Maybe the sheets were really people who had started all over again, come back on some low rung and now were ready to fly up to heaven for a promotion--say to a paramecium. I viewed all things on the earth as equal, in terms of the Grand Scheme. Vice presidents and river rocks had nothing up on each other. So the cotton fibers of a bedsheet could easily return as a simple form of water life, or, for that matter, as a movie star who drove white motorcycles through the glamorous hills of Hollywood.
I also like doing laundry for the feeling of connection it brings me, especially now, when I see my family too little, when most of my time is taken up with things they have no part of. With my hand on Meggie's skirt, I can see her small, keyhole-shaped knees, the sliding-down socks she wears, the nearly worn-out sneakers she won't let me replace. I see her schoolgirl blouses and the half-heart necklace she likes to wear every day lately, advertising the fact that she is someone's best friend. And then, saving the best for last, I see her face, her still slightly rounded cheeks, her stick-out ears, her gorgeous red hair and matching freckles. She has just learned to make her own ponytail, and she stands softly grunting at the mirror in the morning until the lumps are gone--or nearly so. I can't attend to these small things now--sometimes I sleep at Ruth's and am not there in the morning and Meggie goes to school with messy hair; and with questionable color combinations, no doubt. She's lucky she's only nine; it doesn't really matter yet. Her bangs need cutting, her toenails too, probably--Joe can't keep up with these everyday details and still work the number of hours he's required to. I know that eventually all will return to normal at my house, and then we will feel better--and worse, too, of course.
For now, I roll out piecrust, let myself be soothed by the sound of low-voiced interviews or oldies on the radio. I have learned so much lately about the salvation to be found in caretaking, whatever form that caring takes.
Today, while I was rushing around the kitchen making dinner at seven-thirty in the morning, Meggie asked, "Is Ruth your only best friend?"
"Yes," I said, surprised at the evenness of my tone.
"Oh." She sighed softly. "I'm sorry for you, Mommy."
"I know you are."
"Was she always your best friend?"
"No."
"Did you have one before her?"
"I guess so," I told her, then sent her off to school. And then I thought about Carol Conroy. The first time I made a promise with my whole heart, it was to Carol Conroy, and it required me to take care of her rabbit, Ecclesiastes. Carol, who liked very much the sound of words she found in the Bible, was leaving our small New England town to visit Disneyland for ten entire days. My jealousy was mitigated somewhat by the importance of the task she had assigned me. "You have to feed this rabbit and change his water every day," Carol told me solemnly. "And on every third day, you have to clean up his poops. It's not too bad unless he gets sick. But you have to do it even if he gets sick! Now, promise." I stood up straight and promised with my whole heart--I could feel it straining with earnestness--because I loved Carol Conroy in the way that ten-year-old girls do love each other, with a fierce, raggedy flame destined to go out. I vowed to do everything she said unless I died.
Ecclesiastes did get sick--maybe because of some licorice I fed him--and I ended up having to clean his cage several times a day for four days straight. The rabbit's illness only endeared him to me. I didn't resent him; I wanted to help him; and I felt gilded when he recovered. Years later, I would say it was Ecclesiastes that prompted me to become a nurse. And now, years after becoming a nurse--in fact, years after having left the profession to take care of my family, I have again made a promise with my whole heart, again out of love for my best friend. Only this time my friend's name is Ruth. And this time the flame is steady, in no danger of going out. I would say it is of the eternal variety.
So now it is ten-thirty in the morning, and Ruth is in the bathtub, and I am straightening out her bed. She has a white eyelet dust ruffle, white sheets with eyelet trim, a blue-and-white striped comforter, Laura Ashley. There are four fat goosedown pillows, each covered with beautiful embroidered pillowcases, white on white. There is a stack of magazines piled high on the floor and a collection of crystals on the bedside table: rose quartz, amethyst, and a clear white one with a delicate, fractured pattern running through it. They are not working. She is dying, though we don't know when. We are waiting. She is only forty-three and I am only forty-two and all this will not stop being surprising.
I hear her calling my name and I crack open the bathroom door. "Yes?"
"Could you come in here?" Her voice is a little shaky and I realize this is the first time I have heard her sound afraid.
I sit on the floor beside her, rest my arms along the edge of the tub to lean in close, though what I am thinking is that I ought to get in with her. She has used bubble bath and the sweet smell rises up warm and nearly palpable between us. Tahitian Ginger. The label on the bottle features happy natives who do not believe in Western medicine. The bubbles have mostly disappeared; I can see the outline of her body in the water. She is half swimming, turning slightly side to side, hips rising languidly up and down. Her breasts are gone.
"What's up?" I say.
She squeezes her bath sponge over her head. She is almost bald, but not quite. Dark strands of hair cling to the bottom of her head and her neck. Duck fluff, we call it. I told her to shave her head and she'd look great, like a movie star, like a rock singer. It's the latest rage, I told her. "Nah," she said. "What's left, I want to keep. It has sentimental value."
"I was wondering what happens when I die," she says now. "I was thinking, how are they sure? Are they really sure? I mean, what if I get buried alive?"
"They're sure," I tell her. "You sort of . . . shut down. Your heart stops, and your breathing. Certain reflexes disappear, you know, like the pupils in your eyes don't react." She watches me, holding absolutely still, looking like a colorized sculpture of herself. I sigh, then add, "And you get cold, you get real cold, okay? Your skin doesn't feel warm anymore. They're absolutely sure."
"Oh," she says. "Okay. Just checking." She is relieved; you can see it in the uncreasing of her forehead, in the loosening to normal of the area around her mouth. "Wash my back, will you?"
She sits up and rests her forehead on her raised knees. I bump the washcloth over newly revealed bones, the delicate scapulas, the orderly line of vertebrae. "I'm becoming exoskeletal," she says, her voice muffled. "I'm turning into a lobster. Maybe when we die we go back incrementally. You know, a little to the sea, then on to the heavens." She thinks a moment, then says, "I was just lying in here and I felt kind of tired and . . . weird, and then I thought, wait--is this it? I mean, how will I know?" She leans back, frowns. "Is that the same question I just asked? Am I making any sense? Do I keep asking the same goddamn question?"
I'd been making dinner. I had The Oprah Winfrey Show on the little kitchen TV. The phone rang and I wiped my hands on my apron and answered it and she said, "It's in my brain."
"No," I say, "it's not the same question. It's different. First you wanted to know how they'd know; now you want to know how you'll know. Different question entirely. You will know, though. You won't be the same person you are now when it happens. You'll be, I don't know . . . wiser."
"Okay." She stands up, asks for a towel, tells me she's done.
"I should think so," I say. "You've been in there for an hour."
"Have I? Jesus, I thought it was about five minutes."
"That's okay. I was having a good time waiting for you. I was reading your diary."
"Find anything good?"
"The sex stuff. That's good. But it's all bullshit."
"You wish."
I help her into a nightgown: white, white-lace trim, thin strands of ribbon hanging down the front.
She climbs in bed, pulls the covers up. She is tired, so pale. But her blue eyes are still beautiful and her face such a perfect shape you could walk into the room and see her and first just be jealous.
"I suppose it could be tonight, couldn't it?" she says. "God, it really could."
I was with her, sitting in the corner of the examining room, while she read questions off her list. She was pushing...
Although they hated each other at first sight, Ruth and Ann become friends who share their lives, and now must share death. Elizabeth Berg presents a story that strips away some of the mystery of feminine interaction, while maintaining a sense of realness that listeners will surely appreciate. This is due, in part, to Beth Fowler's superb narration. Almost confessional in nature, her delivery is at once thoughtful and humorous, weaving in and out of the text's complex emotions. While TALK BEFORE SLEEP may not give definitive insight to the depths of friendship between two women, it is certainly a tender and credible story, smartly illuminated by Fowler's performance. R.A.P. (c) AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
