Maureen Corrigan

Take this moment right after Claire has made her peculiar request and shortly before Elliot agrees to grant it.

Claire says to Elliot, "'Can I ask you a question?

How mad are you?'

Elliot said he wasn't mad, which was true.

He was sad, confused, a little embarrassed, but not mad.

"'I should have already asked this,' Elliot said.

"'But would I be able to come visit?'

And Claire burst into tears, unable in that moment to bear the rip she clearly felt she'd torn in his self-confidence.

Perhaps one reason Claire wants Elliot to vacate the house is that he needs to be needed, as we all do.

And as she lay dying, Claire doesn't want to take care of him emotionally.

Her friends are easier to be with.

They'll survive her death.

She isn't their whole world.

Another possible explanation for Claire's strange wish is her memory of being part of a crew of women who tended to a friend in her last days.

That friend's house, she tells Elliot, was filled with female energy, chatter, tears, laughter.

Listening to Claire describe her gynocentric model for a good death, Elliot is bewildered.

He thinks to himself that it was as if Claire were speaking a foreign language, as if she'd lived a secret life he was only now discovering, secret and preferred.

But he couldn't say that.

Some Bright Nowhere is about the things we can't say and don't know about each other, as well as the collateral damage that a terminal disease can inflict on even the best of relationships.

It's an odd, beautiful, and absorbing little novel about one of the biggest subjects of them all.