It is 8am in Nashville, Tennessee and novelist Ann Patchett is bursting with sprightly enthusiasm. “I washed my face,” she jokes. We’re barely a couple of minutes into our Zoom conversation and she has given me two “super-hot tips” for forthcoming novels that are going to “win everything” next year – Absolution by Alice McDermott and James, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn by Booker-shortlisted Percival Everett – and let slip that Tom Hanks recently popped by for lunch. Her dog, Sparky, star of the weekly YouTube videos Patchett posts from her independent bookshop, Parnassus Books, sits patiently on the sofa behind her. “I’m a bookseller. That’s what I do,” she says, when I remind her we are supposed to be discussing her own new novel, Tom Lake. “I’m obsessed with other people’s books.”
To say that Patchett is evangelical about books is no mere cliche. In one of her essays, she compares her zeal to that of a Hare Krishna devotee she met many years ago who spent every day proclaiming his love of God to strangers in Chicago airport. “I would stand in an airport to tell people how much I love books, reading them, writing them, making sure other people felt comfortable reading and writing them.”
As a book nerd, who was “raised by nuns” and believes most people are essentially fairly decent, Patchett is neither cool nor edgy. But she gets to hang out with Hollywood royalty, and is friends with pretty much every living American writer you care to mention (Barbara Kingsolver, Elizabeth Gilbert, Lorrie Moore, who lives in the next block when she is in Nashville). She even knows President Biden “a little bit”. “I deeply love the president. He’s spent his life as a public servant. He works tirelessly on behalf of the people,” she says. “And his wife is a fantastic reader.”
On the brink of 60, Patchett is the same age as American big-hitters Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt, but you would never class her as part of the literary brat pack; her novels belong much more in Anne Tyler territory. And while she might not be so widely known in the UK, her reputation as one of the most accomplished US writers of both fiction and nonfiction has grown steadily. (Barack Obama chose her essay collection These Precious Days as one of his books of the year in 2021.)
The daughter of a police officer and a “very beautiful” nurse, Patchett moved to Nashville from Los Angeles with her mother and sister when she was six, after her parents divorced. She returned after attending the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop in her early 20s, to wait tables and fulfil her ambition to become a writer. She published her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, in 1992 when she was 27, but her career only really took off with her fourth, Bel Canto, an operatic hostage drama that won the Women’s prize for fiction in 2002 (she has been shortlisted for the award three times). Her most recent novel, 2019’s The Dutch House, a Jamesian family saga with fairytale overtones, received both rave reviews and a place on the bestseller lists – and, after a request from the author (“no pitches, no hits,” as she put it in her email), was read by Tom Hanks for the audiobook.
With her focus on love and marriage, and some sort of redemption however serious the subject matter, she is at odds in today’s climate of angsty millennial fiction. “I am a glass-half-full, can-do kind of gal. It’s just the salt in my brain,” she admits cheerfully. “So, people give me grief about being too hopeful or too cheerful or too interested in family – it doesn’t matter. I’m not writing all the novels. I’m not the novelist for the age. You want horror, you can get horror. You want dystopia, you can get dystopia. You want disaffected ennui and depression, you got that covered.”
Her retort to those who complain that her fiction is “naive” or even Pollyanna-ish is: “How many serial killers do you know?” She likes to write about the people around her. “If you are writing about mobsters and murderers and psychopaths, then people say: ‘Oh, you’re telling the real story.’ And I think: ‘No, you’re not. Because you don’t know those people.’”
Set on a cherry orchard in northern Michigan during the pandemic, Tom Lake echoes the hostage situation of Bel Canto as three grown-up daughters return to their parents and the family farm during lockdown. Their mother, Lara, passes the time by recounting the story of her youthful flirtation with becoming a Hollywood actor and her doomed first love affair with a charismatic bad-boy actor. Patchett wanted the novel to show how “married love is more valuable than the insane hot love of your 20s,” she says. (Patchett’s essay This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage recounts her disastrous first marriage and meeting her second husband, Dr Karl VanDevender, whom she married when she was 41, describing it as the greatest good fortune of her life.)
While there are clear nods to Chekhov and King Lear, the novel’s biggest debt is to Thornton Wilder’s classic depiction of everyday lives, Our Town, with Lara landing the role of Emily as a schoolgirl. Patchett has been obsessed with Our Town – “the greatest American play ever written”, according to Edward Albee – since she first read it in high school. “It’s about how gorgeous and ordinary life is. And that’s sort of my thing,” she says. “Life is unbelievably beautiful, and very plain, and everything seems slow. And then very, very fast. And the play encapsulates that.” Its message also chimes with Buddhist teachings of impermanence, which these days live alongside Patchett’s “old-school Catholic sensibility”. “I try,” she says simply.
In Tom Lake she set out to recreate this sense that “in a world and a planet that is going to hell, there is still so much beauty and so much joy,” she explains. With the cherry trees in full bloom, Lara feels lockdown guilt at her happiness in having all her loved ones back home. “I can do nothing about the world and the flames beyond leaving free masks in the fruit stand, but the part in which we are trapped is joy itself,” she reflects.
But the flames are not just those of a global pandemic. Lara’s eldest daughter Emily, who plans to make her life on the farm, decides she is not going to have children because of the climate emergency. It is here that even Patchett’s optimism falters. “I can’t imagine going through this with young children. You’re not worrying just for yourself and your own life and a love for trees and birds and all that. You’re worrying about it for the people you love the most.”
Although motherhood is one of the joys in the novel, Patchett’s childlessness had no bearing on the writing. “This is what I do. I make these things up,” she says sternly. “I think about it really hard. I’m not an actress. I’m not a farmer. I’m not a mother.”
She writes with typical frankness of her certainty about not wanting children in her essay There Are No Children Here. “Would you ask Jonathan Franzen the same questions? He doesn’t have children,” she snaps at an insistent radio interviewer. She recalls an event with a very tall “commercially successful literary writer”, whom she calls Q, who insists: “You can’t be a real writer if you don’t have children.” “He was famous at the time. He’s not famous now,” she says. Oof! Poor Q. She channelled her brief desire to adopt, after seeing an adoption advertisement in the newspaper for a boy called Stevie, into her 2007 novel, Run. And it is no coincidence that the three sisters in Tom Lake are named after her editor’s grown-up daughters, who almost made her want to have children, so long as they were like his – “by which I mean not around”.
Although lockdown “made perfect sense” as the setup for Tom Lake, it is not a lockdown novel in the way that her friend Elizabeth Strout’s Oh William! is. “Everybody gets one pandemic book,” she says, and for Patchett that was the essay collection These Precious Days, in which There Are No Children Here appears, along with pieces on decluttering, Snoopy and knitting.
The standout essay is the title one, which went viral after it was published in Harper’s magazine. “It is the most important thing I ever wrote,” Patchett says. It recalls how Tom Hanks’s assistant Sooki Raphael, whom she met backstage at an event for Hanks’s debut book, came to have cancer treatment at the hospital where Patchett’s husband works, and ended up living with them for the whole of lockdown.
A beguiling mix of emails and memoir, it records how these two “affectionate strangers” became friends, practising Kundalini yoga together every morning, cooking and talking about art (Sooki was an artist and her “Matisse-like” picture of Sparky is on the cover of These Precious Days); even attempting an ill-fated experiment with magic mushrooms. Published just before Sooki’s death, along with some of her paintings, the essay provoked “a global outpouring of love”, Patchett says. “It was absolutely the best thing I ever did in my life.”
The essay was only possible, she says, because it followed her first memoir, Truth and Beauty, written in the aftermath of the death of her beloved friend, the poet Lucy Grealy, from a heroin overdose in 2002. She was often asked how Lucy would have felt about the book. The answer was easy – she would have loved it. “If it hadn’t been for writing Truth and Beauty, and people asking ‘What if? What if?’ I would not have been brave enough to say to this very shy person who was dying in my house, ‘Hey, can I write about this?’” she says. “It was great that she got that love, and that she got to know how people thought of her.”
Patchett is the first to admit to a habit of self-congratulation, but both on the page and in person she is saved from coming across as smug or schmaltzy by a disarming mix of steely wit and self-deprecation. “Nobody’s sitting around going, ‘Wow, what we really need is another Patchett novel’,” she quips. Her greatest contribution to literature, she feels, is as an ambassador at Parnassus.
Working with so many young women in the bookshop is “a bit like having 30 daughters,” she jokes. “All of these righteous young humans, who are positive that they have fully arrived.” For a bookseller in Tennessee, book-banning is a very real issue. While these young women are upset at books being banned on grounds of race or sexuality, “they don’t want to talk about Lolita,” she says. “If the right is saying you’re not allowed to read this, and the left is saying you’re not allowed to read that, you have to find your own moral compass,” she says, citing Margaret Atwood as a good example in this regard. As far as Patchett is concerned, “book banning is book banning, cancelling is book banning, shaming is book banning”.
Two years ago she broke her ankle and decided to reread John Updike’s fiction, from first to last. “They are so good at the beginning. He’s brilliant. And then it just gets worse and worse and worse,” she says. “In 30 years people will look back at our generation and find us appalling. We have not arrived. We’re still on the journey. And we will be on the journey until the end of time.”
This afternoon she is expecting American novelist Helen Ellis, whom she will take out for an early dinner at 4.30pm, ahead of interviewing her at the bookshop this evening. Ellis will stay the night, “because everybody sleeps at my house,” she says. “It means you always have a clean house.”
She writes when she can, and always without a contract. “I never owe people work.” The writers she knows who are the most protective of their time are the least productive, she says. “I get the job done. I don’t procrastinate. Creativity, inspiration, all of those words that meant so much when I was 20. Now, I go to work. I show up in the morning. I’m going to get it done.” She knows she can write. “I’m not worried about if I can do this. It’s more can I have an idea that seems worth my time and worth your time. I have to think this really matters.”
Few things irritate her more than writers who complain that writing is the hardest job in the world. “I always want to say, ‘Get a job!’” While you wouldn’t expect her to have a Hemingway-style routine, it’s a surprise that she cites Madonna as a role model. She recalls an interview in which the singer said she never does anything to hurt herself. “And that’s very true for me. I don’t make myself feel guilty. I go to sleep at pretty much the same time. I exercise every night. I make time for my friends. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke.”
Does she ever worry about the maxim that happiness writes white? That her work is just too nice? Tom Lake isn’t an entirely happy novel, she counters. “It’s about climate change. It’s about a really troubling young relationship. There’s plenty of balance in it. But again, I’m just one voice in so many beautiful, disparate, important, vital voices.” And while she doesn’t write with a reader in mind, she knows what she wants to read. “If the world is kicking me in the teeth, in terms of the news and all the things we have to worry about, that’s not what I want in my novel. I don’t need to be lifted up. But I would like the kindness of humanity that surrounds me to have a moment,” she says. “There I am. That’s what I do.”
• Tom Lake by Ann Patchett is published by Bloomsbury. To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
