Author Ann Patchett holds her dog, Sparky, in the bookstore she owns.
Emily Dorio
Ann Patchett’s latest novel is set during the pandemic, but it is also set in the past. The main character, a mother of three adult daughters, tells her children the story of her own youthful romance with a man who is now a famous movie star. The story is told over long days picking cherries on their family farm, where everyone has gathered together for the lockdown. Though the central story revolves around the mercurial movie star, the real focus of the book is the relationship between mothers and daughters, the lives that parents led before they were parents, and what the stories of our past tell us about ourselves. Ann Patchett joins us for a conversation about her new book, “Tom Lake,” ahead of her event in Portland.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The writer Ann Patchett is our guest for the hour today. She’s published two children’s books, five books of nonfiction and nine novels. In addition to being a book writer, she is a bookseller. Patchett co-founded Parnassus Books in her hometown of Nashville in 2011. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters six years later.
Patchett has published two pandemic books in the last two years. “These Precious Days” came first. It is a death-infused and simultaneously joy-filled collection of essays. Now, she has given us the novel “Tom Lake.” Its present-day action takes place over the course of a few days early on in the pandemic when three young adult daughters are helping with the cherry harvest on their family’s orchard in Northern Michigan. As they pick the cherries, their mother tells them a story from her past that they have imagined but never fully heard, her doomed romance with a movie star before he became famous.
It is a warm, wise, beautiful novel and I’m thrilled to have Ann Patchett with us today. Welcome to the show.
Ann Patchett: Thank you.
Miller: So this new novel, it opens at the casting of a community production of Thornton Wilder’s play, “Our Town” and it ends with your note, an author’s note where you say, “If this novel has a goal, it’s to turn the reader back to ‘Our Town,’ into all of Wilder’s work – therein lies the joy.” For people who haven’t seen or read the play, what is “Our Town?”
Patchett: “Our Town” is probably my favorite piece of American literature. I mean, certainly the one that I have gone back to the most in the course of my life. It is a deceptively simple, three act play, starts in 1900 in the mythical New Hampshire town of Grover’s Corners. In the first act, there are two neighbors, the town is explained, the boy is George, the girl is Emily, they’re friends, they like each other. In the second act, they fall in love and get married and in the third act... and I’m gonna go ahead and say this because the play was published in the ‘30′s, and you know, it’s time for you to catch up. Emily dies in childbirth, young, and when she’s at the cemetery, the stage manager who is the central figure in the play, takes her back to an unimportant day in her life so she can see how beautiful life was. And it really is a play about paying attention to your life and realizing that life is just made up of little moments and little connections, and it’s a very beautiful, resonant piece of literature.
Miller: You write in the author’s note that the play has been, for you, a comfort, a guide and an inspiration throughout your life. Those are related, but different things. How has it been a comfort?
Patchett: I think it’s primarily been a comfort because it just continually whacks me back into line. I just reach for it without even thinking, I’ve got it by my desk. And when I think, oh, there’s something else I want. I want a different kind of life. I want a different outcome. I want to do these things I haven’t done before. And I look at “Our Town” and I just think, no, this is it, this is today, this is this beautiful, beautiful life that I have. And the trick is just whether or not I can be aware of it. And I find that very comforting. It’s like the play is saying to me, “wake up, look around.” It’s kind of a Buddhist text really at this point in my life. I certainly didn’t feel that way when I was young, but now it serves that purpose for me.
Miller: Why do you think that that message that you mentioned - to stay engaged, to pay attention, to notice the people and the things around us - I mean, we’ve all heard that in various ways, why is it so hard to do?
Patchett: I think that life is a giant distraction and it can be a distraction in so many ways. It can be the things that you are accumulating, the things that you are wishing to have. If you owned whatever it is you wanted, then you would be happy, you would no longer suffer, you would have the thing that you wanted. So that’s part of the giant distraction of life. Part of the giant distraction of life is this present moment, which is full of media and social media that is constantly clamoring for our attention and keeps us from seeing ourselves and the people we love in the world around us. I mean, there’s just like… every day, you are provided with a million different opportunities to fail in order to see your own life and what it actually means.
Miller: When you were talking about the ways it’s provided solace or guidance, it seems to me that a lot of that has to do with you as just a human being living your life. What about the way it’s affected your work? Your writing?
Patchett: “Our Town” is written in a beautifully simple and straightforward way and that has very much affected my writing.
For myself, there’s plenty of literature out there that I adore that is not straightforward and is not simple. For example, I am a great lover of Henry James. I’m a great lover of Louise Erdrich. You know, there are all sorts of… Colson Whitehead, a deeply complicated… Margaret Atwood. I keep thinking of them, wonderful writers…
Miller: You should sell books!
Patchett: Oh, I should, and I do! Writers who are at the very top of my list. And yet, “Our Town” reminds me what I want to do as a writer, not what I think other people should do. I want to get my point across as clearly and succinctly as possible. If I can say something in 10 sentences instead of 10 pages, I want to. If I can say it in 10 words rather than 10 sentences, I want to. I do not wish to send anyone to the dictionary. I want people to have the experience of reading something that’s very intentional and clear and straightforward. And that comes from “Our Town.”
Miller: When you first talked about this play, you said it was deceptively simple. What’s deceptive about it?
Patchett: Well, it seems very simple to say, “You should just be aware of your life,” and yet it is the thing that is the most impossible thing to do. So, yes, I think it is deceptively simple. I mean, go and sit in the field and look at clouds and you’ll really feel so much better. But why is it so hard to actually pull that off and to make a place for that in our day? Deceptively simple.
Miller: I wonder if you could read us just a part of a paragraph from the novel. I don’t think it really needs much setting up.
Patchett: I don’t think it does either.
[Reading] “There is no explaining this simple truth about life. You will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go, now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well, until one morning you’re picking cherries with your three grown daughters and your husband goes by on the Gator and you are positive that this is all you’ve ever wanted in the world.”
Miller: If part of the “Our Town” message is, pay attention as you go, and then, this later in life wisdom, through your narrator, is, you’re going to forget so much. Where does that leave us?
Patchett: Somewhere in the middle? I know when I was writing that paragraph, I was thinking about myself in my twenties and falling in love and then having the love fall apart and the sobbing - you can’t eat, you can’t sleep, you can’t live without him. And I’m 59. And I think God, if I ran into those people now, would I even know? You know, it’s just both things are so true. You feel, you feel these emotions so passionately, I mean, not just the loss of the love but the love itself, and you look back later and you think, huh..That’s so interesting. I loved that person. I don’t know them anymore. I don’t really remember them. I lost that person. Huh. Yeah, I didn’t think I’d live through it. I did. I don’t ever think about it anymore.
Miller: Do you think you could have written anything close to this novel when you were in your twenties?
Patchett: Probably not. I think that this really is a novel of lived experience. This book is about a lot of different things. But one of the things it’s about is the difference between the love of our twenties that makes you feel like you set yourself on fire and then jumped off a roof, and the love of later in life. My husband and I will have been together for 30 years this year, and those two experiences are not comparable. And it’s so hard. If somebody in my twenties had said to me, “someday, you will have been with the same person for 30 years, and you’ll spend the whole weekend sitting in the den together reading novels, and you just will be happier than anything else.” There’s, like, nothing else that you would want. That would have made no sense to me.
Miller: How would you explain it to that 20 year old, or are you saying that it’s actually unbridgeable? You just have to wait a couple of decades until that version of happiness is actually real happiness.
Patchett: I think that this book is Laura trying to explain that to her three daughters. She’s trying to explain that the crazy white-hot love of her twenties isn’t something that she wants now. Because the guy went on to become a super famous movie star, the girls, who adore their father, are like, but yeah, don’t you want to be married to him? Didn’t you really? Wouldn’t it have been better if you had been married to this incredibly hot, famous guy? And Laura keeps saying, “No, that’s not what you want for your life” And the experience of her married life is shown. She doesn’t sit down and say, “Listen, take a good look at your dad, take a good look at what we’re doing, and what we have.” But the reader sees what they’re doing and what they have, and the reader gets to see that love and so do the girls.
Miller: One of the themes in this novel is that there are often huge gaps in our knowledge of the people around us, friends, and certainly family as well. The three daughters of your narrator, they have all kinds of ideas about what that love affair, what that relationship that their mom had when she was their age, when she was in her early twenties, what it was like, and they’re very wrong.
Patchett: Yeah.
Miller: That it seems like a really useful tool as a novelist to have those kinds of gaps because there’s drama in those gaps and that imbalance. How much does it happen in life?
Patchett: Oh, I think it happens in life all the time. My father is dead. My mother is fine, and three blocks away from where I live. I was very, very close to both of my parents and yet, not only did I really not understand their lives, and still don’t, before I was born; but I think in some essential way, I don’t even believe in their lives beforeI was born. Like, their story starts with my story. And as much as I think, “Oh, well, that’s not true. I’m so evolved, I really think of them as people and I know they did things before me.” But, I’m not completely sure I’m telling myself the truth.
I wrote a piece years ago. I had started this project as a book and then it just turned into a very, very long essay about my father, who was a police officer in Los Angeles. And when I was working on it, I was interviewing him a lot and just asking him questions about his life and his work in the police force. And it was shocking to me how much I didn’t know and how many things I got wrong, but just how many things I had never thought about before. And even though that happened a long time ago, it really fed into this novel. My ignorance of his life fed into this novel.
Miller: There’s a specific version of this when it comes to our parents, and in some ways that complicates things just because of the parental relationship. But I was reminded of your beautiful essay “These Precious Days,” the title essay of your second most recent book, where you write that, even after living intimately with your friend Suki for a few months, you realized how little you knew about her. I mean, it took a while for you to even realize that she had a husband, and it wasn’t like she was keeping that a secret. It’s just you made your assumptions and she never talked about it…
Patchett: Yes.
Miller: What gets in the way, do you think, of deeper knowledge of the people around us? I mean, why are we so often in the dark?
Patchett: Well, with Suki, that’s a particularly interesting question, because Suki was a very private person. And she had worked for a long time, more than 20 years, as Tom Hanks’s personal assistant. And I remember saying to her once, we were out walking, and I said, “Were you like this, therefore you got a job as a movie star’s personal assistant, or did working as a movie star’s personal assistant make you this person where you just never talk about yourself?” And she looked at me and she said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
But the wonderful thing that Suki taught me, or one of the many wonderful things she taught me, was that people are not their histories, or their facts. That’s one way of knowing people. But there was a whole other way of knowing her, which is, we just lived together, and we cooked dinner together every night, and we exercised, and we meditated together, and we took walks together, and we talked about the trees and the birds and what we were reading, and what I was writing, and what she was painting. We had this perfectly present-tense relationship and we knew each other very well without my saying, “So, you know, tell me how you feel about when you first got married, or tell me about your children and their lives”.. you know what I mean? They’re just a really different…
Miller: I totally do. It’s interesting, because I’m thinking about you both as just a person, again, and as a novelist, and I wonder if it would be challenging for you, with that level of understanding of somebody, to actually turn them into a character?
Patchett: Well, if you’re talking about writing an essay about her, as opposed to.. When you say turn her into a character, that feels like a more of a fictional thing.
Miller: Yes.
Patchett: So in that sense, I didn’t turn her into a character, but there was a point with Suki and that experience…So, she came to live with us during the pandemic, she had recurrent pancreatic cancer. She needed to get into a clinical trial really fast, and my husband, who’s a doctor, got her into a trial here in Nashville. The trial was gonna start up very soon thereafter in Los Angeles, she was gonna go home, but then COVID happened and she was trapped, essentially, with us; both because she couldn’t travel and because the trial in L.A. that hadn’t started was canceled.
At some point I knew I was going to have to write about this. And I just couldn’t figure out how to broach the subject with her because again, she was such a private person. But this phenomenal thing was happening in my house. My husband was home from work. I had canceled all my trips. This stranger, who’s dying of recurrent pancreatic cancer, is living with us and painting around the clock because she wants to make as much art as she can before she dies.
I thought of something that my friend Elizabeth Gilbert told me, which was years ago, she shared an essay with me that she had written. And it was the most incredible essay I had ever read. It just rocked me. It was so beautiful and so important. And I said, “Where are you going to publish this?” And she said, “I’m not.” It was about her neighborhood. And I said, “You have to, this is unbelievable.” And she said, “Nope, nope, I wrote it for myself. I cannot publish this because all my neighbors are in it. I can’t do it. This is very private.” She said, “The only person I’m gonna show this to is you.”
And I just went crazy. I was like, “Make it fiction, change their names, set it in Puerto Rico, do whatever you have to do. You’ve got to publish this.” And she said, “No, I just have to write this. I just needed to write this and I wanted you to read it.” And because of that, I was able to go to Suki all these years later and say, “Listen, I’m gonna write about this and it’s gonna be for you and for me and that’s it. And if you read it and you want somebody else to read it, if it’s okay, we’ll take it from there. But right now I’m just gonna write this for the two of us.” And I interviewed her and I worked on it, and I bet she read that essay 50 times. And finally she had her friends read it and her family read it and they all said, “Yeah, this is you, this is you, this is exactly who you are.” And then she said, “Yes, you can publish it.” And so I did.
Miller: You mentioned Elizabeth Gilbert. It’s kismet. Eight years ago, we had her on to talk about her book, “Big Magic,” which is all about her creative process. And at one point she told a story about you, which we went back and grabbed because I thought it would be interesting to listen to. This is about two minutes from that 2015 conversation. This is about your novel, “A State of Wonder.” Right before the part that we’re about to hear, she mentioned that she had spent months working on a novel about a woman who goes to the Amazon, and then she put it aside for a while, because the spirit, really, she felt was no longer in the book she was trying to write.
Let’s have a listen to what she says after that:
Elizabeth Gilbert [recording]: I met the novelist, Ann Patchett. We had this very electrifying encounter. We were big fans of each other and we kind of, you know, fell into each other’s arms, had this big kiss and said, “I love your work. I love your work. I love you. I love you,” a very short meeting.
We became pen pals and she dropped into a letter a couple months later, she was working on a novel about the Amazon jungle, that she had just started on it. And when we met in person a year after that, I had told her that I had my own Amazon jungle novel, but it was dead to me and gone. And we sat over breakfast one morning and I said, “Tell me about your book,” and she said, “No, tell me about yours.” So I went through what it had been about and I said, “Why, tell me about yours?” And she said, “Oh, well, mine’s about a sad, lonely middle- aged spinster from Minnesota who’s been quietly, desperately in love with her married boss for many years, who gets involved in an outrageous money-making scheme down in the Amazon jungle; and a person and a bunch of money go missing, and he sends her down to take care of it, at which point her whole life is turned over into drama and chaos.” In other words, it was exactly the same story, and when we…
Miller [Recording]: Cross your heart?
Gilbert [Recording]: Cross my heart and, and believe me, Ann Patchett, unlike me, is actually like a reasonable human being. So I think it shocked her more than it shocked me, because I live for the expectation of this kind of stuff. Like to me, this is like, of course, that’s how the universe works, right?
We counted back on our fingers to try to figure out when I had lost the idea and when she had found it and it was around the time we met. So in our magical thinking version of the story, we like to say that the idea was exchanged in the kiss – that it left me and went to her. I like to think that it’s because that novel got bored of waiting for me to give my attention to it, and it found a novelist who was ready to work and just said, “If you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go to Miss Patchett down here in Nashville because it looks like she’s actually gonna get the job done.”
Miller: Ann Patchett, what’s your version of that story?
Patchett: It’s very similar. And that is a story that I used to tell on stage when I would go and give talks. And when Liz wrote “Big Magic,” and she came to me and she said, “You know, this story, I’m putting it in my book and I want you to read these pages and tell me if this is the way you remember it.” And I’m like, “Oh, honey, I tell that story like twice a week.” And it really was that and I like to joke that basically I am a great idea’s second choice. After the great idea has hung out with Liz Gilbert for a while and not gotten anywhere, then it shrugs and says, “Ok, well, who’s next on the list? I guess I’ll give Patchett a shot.”
Miller: Has anything like that ever happened to you before or since?
Patchett: It’s happened to me since. I mean, has it happened to me before? Well, maybe, but I just wasn’t aware of it. But several years later, I had a dream that was a novel. It was just absolutely a novel in full, and Liz was visiting, and I mean, I [for] maybe five days, I walked around thinking, “I am the luckiest novelist in the world, I just woke up and I have a completely formed novel in my head and this is exactly what I wanna do.”
And then Liz was in town. Liz is not in town very often. I mean, we only see each other once every couple of years. And we were taking a walk and her partner Rayya had just died, and she was saying, “You know, I’m just struggling to try to come up with where I’m supposed to put this, and I have this idea that is very vague.” And I said, “Oh, wait, no, no, no, I got it. I got it,” and I told her the whole thing and she said, “Oh my God, that’s it. That’s it. That’s the book I’m supposed to be writing.” And she said, “But how could you give it up?” And I said, “Liz, I’ve only had it five days. It’s not like I married it or anything.” And it came to nothing, for both of us. It probably went on to Zadie Smith.
But, it really was a moment where I said, “Oh, I dreamed your dream. That’s all. It just showed up at the wrong house.”
Miller: Your narrator is a kind of reluctant storyteller. She is cajoled into telling her daughters about her life as a young adult and it’s for her daughters. What do you think she gets out of telling her story?
Patchett: Oh, that’s an interesting question. I think she gets the radiant gaze of these three young women who she loves so much. They’re paying attention to her, and they want her, and I think that’s pretty irresistible. She loves those girls and they’re terrific and she knows that she’s pleasing them by telling them the story. And I think that’s what the exchange is.
Miller: It’s possible that the larger version of that question, the universal one is, what do we get when our stories are reflected back to us?
Patchett: Well, I think that Laura does a lot of unintentional reflecting on her past, both her love affair, but also her short lived career as an actress, which she gave up at the end of that summer at Tom Lake. Tom Lake is the name of the mythical summer stock theater where she falls in love with Peter Duke, where they are yet again playing in “Our Town.” And she’s asking herself, did I really want that life? Because her girls keep saying, you must have wanted to be an actress. Everybody wants to be an actress. Everybody was in love with Peter Duke. How could you not want that life? How could you want a life on a cherry orchard? How could you just be happy being married to dad? But she’s really thinking about those things. And whenever she looks at that part of her life, what she finds out is, in fact, she doesn’t miss that past at all. And this is truly the life she wants.
Miller: What was it like for you to focus, as a writer, on what I assume is the oldest version of storytelling we have, the oral tradition? I mean, obviously your novel is written. But the conceit of it is that your main character, the narrator, is basically talking. She is telling this story to her daughters and we get the written down version of it.
Patchett: Yes. And that was really great. So the challenge in this book is there are two plot lines. There’s the story of 1988 when Laura is 24, and then there is the story of 2020 when Laura is 57. And when you have two plot lines as a novelist, or as a reader, the problem is often that you’re more interested in one than the other. And so you read one more quickly and you read one more slowly. And what I was trying to do is keep the reader’s attention even. And I did that by having the daughters constantly interrupt the mother.
So while Laura’s talking about the past, the present is always interjecting into her life, which any time you talk about the past or think about the past, you’re doing it through the lens of the present. It’s impossible not to. This is where we are, this is the rock that we’re standing on, looking back over the ocean, or whatever. And so, to combine those two plot lines and grade them was what I was really trying to do. But it was a lot of fun.
I remember while I was writing this book, the part in Tom Lake is in the past tense and the part in the cherry orchard is in the present tense. And I’m not a huge fan of the present tense. It’s, shall we say, extremely uninformed, but it was the thing that worked. And I got a piece of fan mail while I was writing this book, and the guy said to me, “I read all your books and what I really like about them is you never put anything in the present tense.” And he said, “Nothing should be in the present tense unless it’s a play.”
And I wrote him back and I said, “Well, I’ve got some good news and some bad news I am writing a book, half of which is in the present tense, but it is about a play, and it essentially acts as a play,” and that was a very helpful way for me to think about it: That the present was “Our Town,” in a sense, the present was the play, and the present is telling the story of the past.
Miller: How often do you write back to people who write to you?
Patchett: I write back 100% of the time unless the person’s, I wanna say, crazy, but I’m sure we’re not supposed to say that anymore. Unless it’s just somebody who’s very angry at me or going after me. I was over at the bookstore this morning, all the mail comes in through the bookstore, and the people at the bookstore - and I have never asked them to do this - but they open all my mail with great glee and read it before I get it .
Miller: You’ve never asked them and you don’t mind that they do that?
Patchett: No, I don’t. And here’s why: they take out all the letters that would be disturbing to me. And if it’s someone who seems dangerous, they put that letter in a file and I always say “So, you know, when I go missing…?” and they’re like, “Yeah, yeah, we save it for that.” So what I get is the cream. I just get people saying “Thank you so much. I loved your books. This is so wonderful. Thank you.” And I do write all those people back.
Miller: The love of the orchard lands in Northern Michigan looms really large over this novel. And I don’t want to get into some potential spoilers, but even a character or two who spend an afternoon in this land, sort of half fictional-half real land, they’re enchanted by it and it changes the course of their lives in various ways. When did you first go to Northern Michigan?
Patchett: I’m so glad you asked this question because the present tense story is set in Traverse City, and it’s as real as real could be. And I first went to Petoskey, Michigan in 2001 when I was on book tour for Bel Canto, and I became great friends with the Norcross family that owned the store McLean and Eakin, my favorite bookstore in the country. And I started to go back, my husband and I would go back on vacation. I then later made very good friends with a young couple in Traverse City, Michigan, Ben and Erin Whiting, which is funny because Ben happens to be in my house right now. And…
Miller: But isn’t somebody always in your house?
Patchett: Somebody’s always in my house. That’s not news.
Miller: It just happens to be someone named Ben. Who is that Ben?
Patchett: But Erin grew up on a cherry farm and later opened a professional theater company. So she was my source for everything. And when I was working on this book, I said, “You know, this is the kind of farm I want this to be set on.” She said, “Oh, I know exactly the farm you want to see.” So I went up to see them and she took me to Barb Wunsch’s Farm in Traverse City. It’s a cherry farm, apples, they have some pears and peaches. Mostly cherries and apples. And it was an amazing experience, and everything on that farm is Barb Wunsch’s farm.
Everything I know about orchards comes from that farm, and maybe two weeks ago, a week ago, who knows, this book tour... I was back in Traverse City to do an event and Ben and Erin and I went back to Barb’s farm and she had a barbecue for me. And to go back to that farm that I had seen before, but I had then spent all this time living there in my head, and to walk down those roads and to go through those woods and down to the beach to sit at her kitchen table, every single thing is true and it is the most beautiful heart-opening place I know, and I feel like the Michigan Board of Tourism should start sending me checks because everybody is writing to me now and saying what I really want to do is get a farm, a cherry farm, in Northern Michigan.
Miller: They should read the whole book. I mean, it’s beautiful but it’s hard work.
Patchett: Well, sure. It absolutely is hard work. And I spent some years of my childhood on a fake farm in rural Tennessee outside of Nashville. By which I mean, we lived on a farm and we were not farmers - we had pigs and horses and chickens and that sort of thing, but we were surrounded by real farms. And I think I always have known that farm work is not only hard work but it’s all year round hard work. But it’s also very regular and beautiful and you don’t get away from it. I mean, there’s a reason that people have 5th and 6th generation farms, because that’s in you and you’re not gonna let it go.
Miller: You’ve written that you need to know the overall shape of your novels before you can actually write them. You need to have your destination before you start the journey. I’m curious what the surprises can be along the way because it’s not like you know everything about it. You just, unlike some writers who say, it’ll unfold as we go and that’s my process, you know where you’re going. So what are the potential detours that you don’t see coming?
Patchett: It’s an interesting question, and what’s interesting to me about it is I feel like people need to believe that authors aren’t in control, and that they are surprised by their own work and thrown off by it. The way I work, which is not the right way, it’s just the way I do it, I will think about a story for a year or two, or three, or whatever, before I start to write it. So there are endless surprises. I change my mind constantly. I throw things away and pick other things up, but I’m not writing it down. It’s all in my head. When I sit down to write a book, I have a pretty good idea about how it’s all going to go.
Now, do I know what they’re gonna say to one another in a given scene, or exactly what one scene then takes you into the next scene, no. But I think about Edward P. Jones and “The Known World,” and from what I understand, all of his work, he works in his head and he can just recite it to you before he starts to write it. That’s how well he knows what he is eventually going to write down on a piece of paper. So I’m not there. But it really isn’t about being surprised. It’s about paying very close attention to what I’m doing.
Miller: In one of the essays in your last collection, an essay about throwing physical stuff out as part of a preparation for death - this was a pandemic activity that I think a lot of people did. You include a note about craft, you say writing must be separate from editing and if you try to do both at once, nothing will get done. Is that hard to actually follow, to not critique in some way, to not let your editing brain take the reins for a second?
Patchett: Well, certainly when I finish a chapter, I edit it, I go back and I polish it, I change things around. I rewrite things. I look for better words. I look for how I could be more concise. I don’t go to chapter three until I feel like chapter two is completely done, which, again, is not the way most people work. I do all of my drafts as I go along.
But it is also true that everything seems horrible at first. And so if I write, my impulse is to just delete. You know, if I write five pages, I think, “Oh, that’s junk, that’s ridiculous. I’m not gonna use that.” But I’ve been doing this long enough to know that I have to suspend judgment because I am not fit to make that call. I just have to write. I just have to keep writing until I get a little bit farther along and then I can look and shape, but if I try to edit and write [at the] same time, what I wind up with is absolutely nothing.
Miller: I’ve read that this is the first novel that you have written while walking, literally. You have one of those treadmill desks. Are you able to actually feel or see the ways in which that activity, that physicality, affected the writing?
Patchett: Absolutely. It was the craziest thing. So I’ve had this treadmill desk for nine years, and I got it for my 50th birthday and I had only always used it for emails and for long phone calls and maybe like if I was writing an essay, I would revise it on the treadmill. For whatever reason when I started this novel, I just thought, I’m gonna give this a shot. I’m just gonna see how this goes if I try to write on the treadmill desk, and I ended up writing the whole book while I was walking. And it made a huge difference. For one thing, it made me really happy, just from an exercise - endorphins - and it’s not really exercise, I was going 1.5 miles an hour. But the movement, the engagement, made me happy. And I think that happiness really comes into the book.
But there were all sorts of really interesting byproducts. For example, when I am writing and I get stuck on something, if it’s a sentence or an idea or I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do next, I can get unbelievably sleepy. Like that kind of sleepy that you get in church when you’re a kid or a bad lecture. There’s no way you can stay awake and I will put my head down on my desk for two minutes. That doesn’t happen when you’re walking.
And I wasn’t distracted. I don’t understand this, but it’s like the part of my brain that is saying left foot-right foot, left foot-right foot, left foot- right foot, is the same part of my brain that is normally, when I’m sitting at my regular desk going, “Oh, you gotta get up and flip the laundry, what are you gonna make for dinner? You’ve got to call your agent back. You’ve got to go check in with your mother. Did you remember to send Susan a birthday card?,” because that ticker tape is always going in my brain. And when I was walking, I didn’t have that.
Miller: It seems like magic. You’ve arrived at the answer.
Patchett: Ahh… It was incredible magic. Also, at this point in my life, I have trouble, and really for a lot of my life, you write a novel and you get, as we say, “stoved up.” So my right shoulder by the end of the book is reaching up towards my right ear, my wrists hurt, my hands hurt, my back hurts. None of that was true on the treadmill. Because on the treadmill, you are forced into perfect alignment. So at the end of the day my feet would hurt. But my neck didn’t hurt, my arms didn’t hurt. I actually saw somebody, a doctor who said, “Oh, you have to have carpal tunnel surgery.” And I thought, “No, I’m gonna just try a treadmill.” And my problem was misalignment.
So yeah, I could become the spokesperson for cherry farms and treadmills.
Miller: I was going to say that. I wonder if you could read us one more passage from the book. This comes near the end, when the narrator’s daughters are once again going back into the orchard to pick the cherries. I think that’s maybe all of the setup that we need.
Patchett: It’s the end of a rainstorm. And two of the three daughters are there.
[Reading] “Maisie and Nell get their hats, their bug spray and go into the great dripping world wearing muck boots. I stay behind to make lunch, which I should have been working on while I was talking all this time. The past need not be so all-encompassing that it renders us incapable of making egg salad. The past, where I had to type it up, would look like a disaster. But regardless of how it ended, we all had many good days. In that sense, the past is much like the present, because the present, this unparalleled disaster, is the happiest time of my life. Joe and I here on this farm, our three girls grown and gone and then returned. All of us working together to take the cherries off the trees. Ask that girl who left Tom Lake what she wanted out of life, and she never in a million years would have said the Nelson farm in Traverse City, Michigan. But as it turned out, it was all she wanted.
“Once I finish with the sandwiches and put the bags of cookies and chips in a backpack, I walk out past the kitchen garden. The lettuce and tomato plants and zinnias are already straightening up from the beating they’ve taken. Those tiny periwinkle butterflies are working their rounds. Where do the periwinkles go in a rain like that? It’s not that I’m unaware of the suffering, and the soon to be more suffering in the world. It’s that I know suffering exists beside wet grass and a bright blue sky recently scrubbed by rain. The beauty and the suffering are equally true. Our Town taught me that.”
Can I say something about that?
Miller: Please.
Patchett: If you would like to hear that in a better version, Meryl Streep reads the audiobook and it is so beautiful. It will just bring you to your knees.
Miller: I’m not even sure I can handle that right now, but I saw that and my breath was taken in advance of listening when I saw that it’s Meryl Streep doing this one. Tom Hanks did a recent book and now you get Meryl Streep.
Patchett: Yep.
Miller: Your narrator there says that the early days of the pandemic, this unparalleled disaster, are the happiest times of her life. It reminded me of something you wrote in your last book, that this international catastrophe was, in many ways, a respite for you, a time without travel and book tours and external obligations.
Patchett: Yes.
Miller: How do you reckon with this? Being on the winning end of cosmic luck?
Patchett: I am grateful and not ashamed. I appreciate it. And I try to take what I am given and turn it back out to other people as best I can. And I will say there were so many people, and we all whispered it, who said, my kids are home, my husband’s home, I get to see my neighbors. I mean, look at this beautiful life. We were so aware, in the horror of everything that was going on, this is life, this is life, this is so precious.
Miller: We just have about a minute left, but in the vein of “Our Town” and paying attention to the small daily joys, what’s giving you joy right now?
Patchett: It’s been really nice talking to you. And I’m not even joking. I mean, this has been a really great interview and I’m very, very grateful for that. I am on book tour, and I have been going out on book tour since I was 27 years old, and I have always hated book tour. It’s exhausting and overwhelming, and I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if on this book tour, I decided that I liked it?
Miller: A mental trick. Is that working?
Patchett: It is working! If I decide, instead of when people say, “Oh my gosh, you’re on book tour, you’re having such a great time,” instead of saying, “No,” I say “Yes,” because I am. And people are so kind. People are so kind. And I am so grateful.
Miller: Ann Patchett, it was a true pleasure talking to you. Thank you very much. Enjoy the rest of your tour.
Patchett: Thank you. I’m going to.
Miller: Ann Patchett. Her latest novel is called “Tom Lake.”
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