Nashville-based author Ann Patchett, one of the international headliners at the 2024 Auckland Writers Festival. Photo / Emily Dorio
She’s pals with the likes of Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep but bestselling Nashville-based novelist Ann Patchett is no celebrity author. In an exclusive interview before her appearance at the Auckland Writers Festival next week, she talks to Joanna Wane about life, love and the curse of beauty.
Ann Patchett’s mother was beautiful. Luminously beautiful. The kind of beautiful that meant she had to have special cheques printed without her phone number on them to stop salesmen ringing up to ask her out on a date. Even when Patchett was in her 20s, she can remember her mother telling everyone to get down on the floor and pretend no one was home when yet another unwanted admirer came knocking at the door.
In Sisters, from her recent essay collection These Precious Days, the bestselling Nashville-based writer describes Jeanne Ray as a cross between a Hitchcock heroine and one of director John Derek’s wives. People who mistook mother and daughter for siblings wouldn’t ask what Ray was doing right, but what Patchett was doing wrong.
Patchett was 5 when her mother fell in love with another man who had four kids of his own, eventually remarrying twice. Knowing some of the family’s real-life back story adds a whole new dimension to Patchett’s most biographical novel, Commonwealth, which I re-read after our Zoom call last week. Published in 2016, it remains one of her personal favourites.
Still head-turningly beautiful and vibrant today at the age of 86, her mother was also warm and funny and kind. The two women remain engagingly close. Yet it seems miraculous Patchett managed to survive adolescence with even a shred of self-esteem intact, given that kind of impossible standard to live up to.
As a child, she spent hours sitting on the edge of the bathtub, watching her mother apply makeup and roll her hair. “You know, it really was such a great thing for me because I remember thinking very early on, ‘Well, I’m not doing that’,” she says, wryly noting a lack of both the will and the raw material required.
“I feel like it saved me so much time and unhappiness because I’m a perfectly nice-looking person but great beauty, you can’t buy that. It gave me the freedom to be smart. And my mother’s beauty was a real double-edged sword.”
It’s something Patchett’s been talking about lately with a close friend, also a writer, who was 7 when her “extraordinarily beautiful” mother ran off with another man. “She’s working through it in therapy and said what she finally understood is that beauty killed her family - her happiness, her childhood, her security. Why would you want anything to do with beauty?”
One of the international headliners at the Auckland Writers Festival next week, Patchett seems to have emerged from the complexities of her own childhood with remarkable sanguinity. Her books, typically described as literary fiction, aren’t inhabited by serial killers or set in a dystopian future. She doesn’t like horror movies or true-crime podcasts, either. “It’s just not my thing.”
Complex relationship studies, her stories have plenty of grit - I don’t think I’ve got to the end of a single one yet without crying - but laced with acute Austenesque observations and a quality of gentle kindness that feels almost old-fashioned. She’s typically unapologetic about that. “There are plenty of people dealing with the darker side of human nature,” she once said. “And if I am going to write about people who are kind and generous and loving and thoughtful, so what?”
Having Patchett, a New York Times bestseller, among the impressive line-up at this year’s festival is a real coup. Last year, she was presented with a National Humanities Medal by US President Joe Biden “for putting into words the beauty, pain and complexity of human nature”. In 2021, Barack Obama chose These Precious Days among his books of the year.
Described in the festival programme as “one of the world’s most lauded and beloved writers”, Patchett was due here in 2020 to talk about her novel The Dutch House, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but the Covid pandemic put an end to that. Her visit to Auckland, sandwiched between appearances at the Sydney and Melbourne Writers Festivals, comes off the back of her latest book, Tom Lake. When we talk, she’s just had a Covid booster in anticipation of the trip.
Each stop on Patchett’s tour includes what should be a lively “in conversation” session with fellow author Meg Mason, who we like to claim as one of our own. Based in Sydney, she grew up in New Zealand and got to know Patchett after the American writer provided a generous cover endorsement of Mason’s celebrated second novel Sorrow and Bliss, which won Fiction Book of the Year in the 2022 British Book Awards.
Set during lockdown on a Michigan cherry farm, Tom Lake peels back layers of memory as a middle-aged mother tells her three adult daughters the story of a long-ago romance with a charismatic young actor who later became a film star. The audiobook, released late last year, is read by Meryl Streep.
Patchett, who co-owns Parnassus Books, an independent store in Nashville, is connected. Good friends include Barbara Kingsolver (Demon Copperhead, The Poisonwood Bible) and Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat Pray Love). Video clips on YouTube show her talking books with the likes of Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern. Tom Hanks, who did the audiobook for The Dutch House, pops by for lunch when he and wife Rita Wilson are in town.
Patchett first met Streep more than 15 years ago when there was a brief possibility of her playing the part of American soprano Roxane Coss in the film adaptation of Patchett’s breakthrough Orange Prize winner Bel Canto - a part that eventually went to Julianne Moore. “We had lunch,” she tells me. “And when this came around, hers was the voice in my head. She has three daughters [like Lara, in Tom Lake] and it seemed so perfect.
“My agent is Felicity Blunt, who is married to Stanley Tucci [Streep’s co-star in The Devil Wears Prada]. And I said to Felicity, ‘If I wrote an email to Meryl, would you send it to her?’ “She said, ‘Well, here’s her email. Just do it yourself.’ And Meryl wrote me right back and said, ‘Oh, yes, of course.’ I said, ‘Don’t you want to read it first?’ And she was like, ‘Oh, I read all of your books. It’ll be great.’ And she was every single thing you would want Meryl Streep to be. She was divine.”
This is a very Patchett kind of story. No ego or big-noting, but no false self-deprecation, either. She never reads her books after they’ve been published (and apparently doesn’t read stories about herself, either, which is a relief, because profiling a writer is always a particularly daunting assignment). However, she recently revisited Bel Canto for the first time in some 24 years for a special annotated edition she’ll finish up when she gets home from this trip, covering the margins with handwritten notes.
“Damn, that is the saddest book I think I’ve ever read,” she says. “I couldn’t believe I wrote it because it’s funny and joyful and tender and loving. And it is so not jaded, you know? It’s so completely sincere and open-hearted at every moment. And then they all die. It’s just shocking. It’s shocking how upsetting it is.”
Set in an unnamed South American country, Bel Canto is based on the Japanese embassy hostage crisis in Peru in the late 90s, which ran for 126 days before its bloody conclusion. Reviewers have drawn comparisons with the lockdown setting of Tom Lake, and Patchett does see elements of that in hindsight. In a gorgeous turn of phrase, one reviewer describes the three sisters in her latest novel as earnest, vulnerable girls who bruise as easily as ripe fruit.
Patchett, who’s been married twice, has never had - never truly wanted - any children of her own. In Tom Lake, the eldest daughter has also decided against having a family, as a personal response to a sense of impending doom. Patchett relates to that, despite considering herself a glass-half-full kind of gal.
“I see people with little babies and I just think, ‘God bless’. The climate crisis is so terrifying,” she says. “But I’m gonna die and I think there’s a really good chance I may get out in time. I hope that I am completely wrong and that there is a save. But I cannot imagine how exponentially more terrifying it would be if you had little children.”
At the core of Tom Lake is the difference between the wild, heady love you experience in your 20s and the deeply satisfying love you can have, if you’re lucky, in your 50s. “And the idea that it’s very, very hard to imagine our parents without us.”
Patchett’s father - “the only person who was better looking than my mother” - was one of seven children, all of whom produced a clutch of equally good-looking kids. A police captain in Los Angeles, he was among the officers who arrested Sirhan Sirhan after Robert Kennedy was assassinated and, a year later, brought in cult leader Charles Manson and his killer “family”.
When the couple divorced in the late 1960s, Ray moved with her two young daughters to Nashville, following the man who would become her second husband. For Patchett, who never wanted to be anything other than a writer (her childhood touchstone was Snoopy, the typewriter-toting beagle in the Peanuts comic strip), it was a transformative moment in her life.
“There were, among my good, dear, smart, sweet cousins, those who didn’t graduate from high school, had children crazy early by themselves and had hard, hard lives because they were good-looking on a beach in a bikini, at the same time that I was in a private Catholic girls school in Tennessee where they would bust you for wearing the wrong socks,” she says. “That’s the world I grew up in. It wasn’t like I was smarter or more virtuous. I just lived in Nashville, which is a hip place now but it was literally a cow town back then.
“You know, I can remember my father saying to me, ‘I’m so proud of you and your sister. You never went to parties and got high.’ I was like, ‘Dad, I was never invited to those parties.’ I was never once sitting in a circle of people who were passing a joint around. Never once. I was just going to Mass. They kept me in a closet until my frontal cortex had developed. Then I married the first guy who asked me out to dinner.”
That disastrous marriage, in her early 20s, lasted for a year. For the past three decades, she’s been with her second husband, Karl VanDevender, who’s a doctor in Nashville. They live in the leafy suburbs, a 15-minute drive from her bookshop.
A Democratic enclave within a Republican stronghold, the legendary country music capital is a major healthcare hub and the third largest publishing centre after New York and Los Angeles, thanks to its dominant Christian press. Its reputation for spicy, southern fried “hot chicken” is wasted on Patchett, who’s vegetarian.
The city’s population has been exploding for the past decade, she says. A realtor friend told her people are moving to Nashville from California because they don’t want to pay state sales tax (which Tennessee doesn’t have), they didn’t like schools being closed during the Covid pandemic (in Tennessee, schools stayed open) and they want to be able to carry a gun.
“So, weirdly, the influx of people is probably making us more conservative, rather than more liberal. But one of the things I love about living here is that there are so many places where I know people who literally have never met somebody who voted for Trump. And I know a ton of people who voted for Trump and are good people. I mean, I couldn’t disagree with them more, but they would do anything for me and I would do anything for them.”
Now 60, she’s the same age that her mother was when she published her own first novel after retiring as a nurse, producing a series of lively romantic romps - a late-life career change that was her daughter’s idea. “I always say my mother was the spokesperson for sex over 60. Go, Mom!”
Patchett already knows what her next novel will be, although she’s in no rush to start it. At Parnassus Books, often she’ll quietly slip in and out the back door, because once someone recognises her, she risks being stuck for hours out on the shop floor. Apparently she’s the kind of writer people feel compelled to hug.
At home, she reads print editions of the local newspaper, The Tennessean, and The New York Times. Apart from posting weekly YouTube videos about books, she doesn’t engage with social media or watch television. She doesn’t even have a mobile phone.
“I listen to the radio, but I take my opinion of the world from what I see. I understand that horrible things are happening, but a lot of kindness is what I see, and I feel that’s underrepresented in contemporary fiction,” she says. “When people come over for dinner and they want to talk about Trump, I’m like ‘No. We all agree. We’re on the same page. I am not going to stand here and beat this into the ground and make myself crazy and miserable.’
“The thing that matters to me so much is that they don’t get my sanity. I will live a good life. I will do anything I can do. I will be charitable, I will be helpful, I will be involved. But I am not going to perseverate on suffering that I can have no impact on. So there you go.”
• Ann Patchett is in conversation with Meg Mason at the Aotea Centre on May 19, and also on a panel session with Patricia Grace and US author Bonnie Garmus (Lessons in Chemistry), as part of the Auckland Writers Festival.
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior feature writer in the NZ Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special focus on social issues and the arts.
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