Best-selling author Ann Patchett takes a writing break to speak in Sarasota
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Because she moved around a lot as a child, best-selling author Ann Patchett said she was slow to learn to read, but she has made up for lost time.
“I didn’t go to school all that much from first through third grade and I wasn’t a comfortable reader when I was child,” she said in a recent telephone interview to talk about her appearance as the guest author at the annual Library Foundation for Sarasota County Love Our Libraries luncheon. “But very soon, I became a devoted reader, and reading has always been the central part of my life, which has become more true as I’ve become older.”
Patchett has been building a growing following since her debut novel, “The Patron Saint of Liars,” was published in 1992. Since then, she has written “Bel Canto,” which received the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction, “The Magician’s Assistant,” “Commonwealth,” “The Dutch House,” “Truth & Beauty: A Friendship,” “Run,” “These Precious Days” and “Tom Lake,” published in 2023. She also has spoken out about “Bel Canto” and “The Patron Saint of Liars” being among hundreds of books banned in Florida.
Her most recent is a new children’s book “The Verts: A story of Introverts and Extroverts,” created with illustrator Robin Preiss Glasser.
As the owner of the independent bookstore Parnassus Books in Nashville, which opened in 2011, Patchett said she is responsible for making selections for its First Editions Club, so she reads, on average, at least five books per month (she doesn’t count the ones she doesn’t finish). And those books inspire her own writing.
“The books I read, by and large, are not going to be published for five months. I’m reading June right now. I read so much B material and I don’t read bad books,” she said. Patchett knows she will eventually find “the A book in there, the extraordinary book, and it’s so meaningful to find a book that isn’t coming out for months. I feel like I’m reading it alone in the world and it’s thrilling.”
She is eager for people to read “Memorial Days” by Geraldine Brooks, which will be published Feb. 4, and Ocean Vuong’s “The Emperor of Gladness,” publishing May 13.
With all that reading, book tours to promote her latest efforts, interviews and speaking appearances, Patchett still finds time to write.
“Oddly, I have been more prolific since I opened the bookstore than I was before,” she said. “It doesn’t make any sense. I think it actually is very inspiring to me. It makes me want to write good books, and let me just say, there are so many good books being published every year and always a handful of great ones. That is not because of the times we live in. It’s always been true. There’s always been junk and there’s always been a handful of great books and the great books rise to the top.”
Three of Patchett’s own books were included in The New York Times’ recent list of the 100 best books of the 21st century as picked by readers – “Bel Canto” at No. 24; “The Dutch House” at No. 60 and “Tom Lake” at No. 82. The Times editors ranked “Bel Canto” at No. 98 on their own list.
Yearning for a writing career
Her love for reading stirred a dream to become a writer.
“My goal was always to support myself with writing. That was the dream of my life. Not that I thought something would happen right away,” she said. “But I wouldn’t have to teach. I wouldn’t need another job. I never changed that dream. I was someone who was happy living in an efficiency apartment with an old car. I never had grand ideas for my life. If I can make the rent, buy food and cover my health insurance by writing, that would be the greatest life I could imagine. And that happened.”
She started by writing non-fiction articles for newspapers and magazines, not thinking about writing a best-seller.
“Low expectations are the key to happiness,” she said.
Sadly, Patchett said, the path she took is almost non-existent now.
“I grew up in the age, the golden age of the glossy magazines,” she said. She had articles in Seventeen and Glamour and “slowly graduated to GQ and Vogue and Gourmet and then to The New York Times and The Atlantic and Harpers. I wrote junk, happily, to pay those bills. But those kinds of magazine jobs are impossible to find now.”
Those early writing gigs also helped prepare her to deal with disappointment.
“It was so good in not becoming a sensitive person. If you write something for a magazine or a newspaper, you’ve got five different layers of editors and assistants, saying ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ or ‘It should be like this.’ Or I’d be assigned a 2,000-word piece and the ad from Noxzema would get pulled an hour before press and now you’re down to 800 words and I’d say give me an hour and I’ll cut 1,200 words out of this thing.”
From non-fiction articles to fiction books
In the early days of her career, all the non-fiction writing was done on assignment. But with fiction, “I don’t sell my books before I finish them and nobody sees them. I call my editor one day and say 'I finished something.' I like to have it be mine for a while.”
She finds inspiration everywhere but has become more selective in what subjects or ideas she’ll develop into a story.
“When I was young, the world was full of ideas, anything worth thinking about was worth writing about,” she said. “Now I ask 'is it worth the reader’s time? Is it worth my time?' I have such an awareness of time. I don’t want to write something just because I can. I want to write something because I feel it really matters.”
It can take her a while to finish each book. Patchett said she started her latest novel last April “and then from September to January I didn’t work on it at all because I had a children’s book come out (“The Verts”) and I was on a book tour and then the holidays. I’m just now going back to it. I’m on page 71. It can take me a year to write the first 100 pages and three months to write the next 250 pages. I’m a very slow starter and a very strong finisher.”
One of the hardest things for new authors is to find an agent, editor or publisher willing to take a chance.
Patchett said she had a story published in the Paris Review when she was 20 and she got an agent from that article.
“When I wrote my first novel, ‘Patron Saint of Liars,' which I finished when I was 26, I sent it to this agent, who had signed me when I was 20, who I’d not met, and said, ‘Here’s my book.’”
Patchett dropped the book at the agent’s office in New York and drove to her mother’s house in Tennessee. “By the time I got there, my mother was in the driveway saying they sold your book. People hate to hear that.”
Her mother got the call because Patchett doesn’t use cell phones. She also has no social media presence, though she does make videos for the bookstore.
Everything is in perspective
Patchett has a grounded view of what she does. Though thousands of her readers would disagree she said, “Literary fiction doesn’t make any difference. I’m not curing cancer. I’m not a 14-year-old selling makeup on Instagram. I’m a very successful writer of literary fiction, which is like saying I’m a very successful maker of dyed Ukrainian eggs. It’s a really small subset.”
Hollywood has come calling, but she has mixed feelings about the possibilities. “The Patron Saint of Liars” was made into a film in 1998 starring Dana Delany and Sada Thompson. Patchett is credited as writer with Lynn Roth. “Bel Canto,” about an opera singer caught in a hostage situation, was made into a film “that 10 people saw” in 2018 with Julianne Moore and Ken Watanabe.
“Bel Canto” also was adapted into an opera by Peruvian composer Jimmy Lopez, with a libretto by Pulitzer Prize winner Nilo Cruz, which had its world premiere in 2015 at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. It was later filmed for PBS. Patchett described it as “extraordinary” and said it was more rewarding than film and TV possibilities.
“Things have been optioned and I have found it to almost always be a very unsatisfying use of my time,” she said. “There's always a ton of talk and a ton of praise and a modest amount of money and people wanting to have meetings and talk and talk and talk and nothing comes of it. I’m not closed to the idea, but I’ve turned down a lot more offers than I’ve accepted. It is this huge spinning vortex of energy with a ton of other people and nothing comes of it.”
She did get excited by a project by artist Becky Suss, who created a series of paintings inspired by “The Dutch House.”
“Everybody always wants to know when somebody makes a movie about your book, but wait until somebody makes a series of 10 paintings out of your book. That is incredible.”
In Sarasota, Patchett will be interviewed by award-winning author Elizabeth McCracken in support of the Library Foundation, which champions strong public libraries, supports innovation and helps to extend the library system’s reach for everyone in Sarasota County. The luncheon event -- which has previously featured such authors as Colson Whitehead, Erik Larson, James Patterson, Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Bob Woodward, David Brooks, Dave Barry, Carl Hiasen and others -- sold out in record time. For more information, go to sarasotalibraryfoundation.org.