10 Columbus Cir, New York, NY 10023, United States
Ann Patchett with her husband Karl VanDevender at TIME'S 100 Most Influential People In The World celebrating at Jazz at Lincoln Center on April 24, 2012.
(St. Elizabeth's, a home for unwed mothers in Habit, Kentu...)
St. Elizabeth's, a home for unwed mothers in Habit, Kentucky, usually harbors its residents for only a little while. Not so Rose Clinton, a beautiful, mysterious woman who comes to the home pregnant but not unwed, and stays. She plans to give up her child, thinking she cannot be the mother it needs. But when Cecilia is born, Rose makes a place for herself and her daughter amid St. Elizabeth's extended family of nuns and an ever-changing collection of pregnant teenage girls. Rose's past won't be kept away, though, even by St. Elizabeth's; she cannot remain untouched by what she has left behind, even as she cannot change who she has become in the leaving.
(Taft tells the moving story of John Nickel, an ex-jazz mu...)
Taft tells the moving story of John Nickel, an ex-jazz musician who wanted nothing more than to be a good father. When his lover takes away his son, he's left only with his Beale Street, Memphis bar. He hires a young waitress named Fay Taft who brings with her a desperate, dangerous brother, Carl, and the possibility of new intimacy. Nickel finds himself consumed with Fay and Carl's dead father Taft obsessing over and reconstructing the life of a man he never met.
(Sabine- twenty years a magician's assistant to her handso...)
Sabine- twenty years a magician's assistant to her handsome, charming husband - is suddenly a widow. In the wake of his death, she finds he has left a final trick; a false identity and a family allegedly lost in a tragic accident but now revealed as very much alive and well. Named as heirs in his will, they enter Sabine's life and set her on an adventure of unraveling his secrets, from sunny Los Angeles to the windswept plains of Nebraska, that will work its own sort of magic on her.
(In an unnamed South American country, a world-renowned so...)
In an unnamed South American country, a world-renowned soprano sings at a birthday party in honor of a visiting Japanese industrial titan. Alas, in the opening sequence, a ragtag band of 18 terrorists enters the vice-presidential mansion through the air conditioning ducts. Their quarry is the president, who has unfortunately stayed home to watch a favorite soap opera. And thus, from the beginning, things go awry.
(What happens when the person who is your family is someon...)
What happens when the person who is your family is someone you aren't bound to by blood? What happens when the person you promise to love and to honor for the rest of your life is not your lover, but your best friend? In Truth & Beauty, her frank and startlingly intimate first work of nonfiction, Ann Patchett shines a fresh, revealing light on the world of women's friendships and shows us what it means to stand together. Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and, after enrolling in the Iowa Writers' Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work was. Through love, fame, drugs, and despair, this book shows us what it means to be part of two lives that are intertwined.
(Since their mother's death, Tip and Teddy Doyle have been...)
Since their mother's death, Tip and Teddy Doyle have been raised by their loving, possessive, and ambitious father. As the former mayor of Boston, Bernard Doyle wants to see his sons in politics, a dream the boys have never shared. But when an argument in a blinding New England snowstorm inadvertently causes an accident that involves a stranger and her child, all Bernard Doyle cares about is his ability to keep his children - all his children - safe. Set over a period of twenty-four hours, Run takes us from the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard to a home for retired Catholic priests in downtown Boston. It shows us how worlds of privilege and poverty can coexist only blocks apart from each other, and how the family can include people you've never even met.
(Based on her lauded commencement address at Sarah Lawrenc...)
Based on her lauded commencement address at Sarah Lawrence College, this stirring essay by bestselling author Ann Patchett offers hope and inspiration for anyone at a crossroads, whether graduating, changing careers, or transitioning from one life stage to another. With wit and candor, Patchett tells her own story of attending college, graduating, and struggling with the inevitable question, What now? From student to line cook to teacher to waitress and eventually to award-winning author, Patchett's own life has taken many twists and turns that make her exploration genuine and resonant.
(As Dr. Marina Singh embarks upon an uncertain odyssey int...)
As Dr. Marina Singh embarks upon an uncertain odyssey into the insect-infested Amazon, she will be forced to surrender herself to the lush but forbidding world that awaits within the jungle. Charged with finding her former mentor Dr. Annick Swenson, a researcher who has disappeared while working on a valuable new drug, she will have to confront her own memories of tragedy and sacrifice as she journeys into the unforgiving heart of darkness.
(Blending literature and memoir, Ann Patchett examines her...)
Blending literature and memoir, Ann Patchett examines her deepest commitments - to writing, family, friends, dogs, books, and her husband - creating a resonant portrait of a life in This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage takes us into the very real world of Ann Patchett’s life. Stretching from her childhood to the present day, from a disastrous early marriage to a later happy one, it covers a multitude of topics, including relationships with family and friends, and charts the hard work and joy of writing, and the unexpected thrill of opening a bookstore. As she shares stories of the people, places, ideals, and art to which she has remained indelibly committed, Ann Patchett brings into focus the large experiences and small moments that have shaped her as a daughter, wife, and writer.
(One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins...)
One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny’s mother, Beverly - thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families. Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six children involved. Spending summers together in Virginia, the Keating and Cousins children forge a lasting bond that is based on a shared disillusionment with their parents and the strange and genuine affection that grows up between them. When, in her twenties, Franny begins an affair with the legendary author Leon Posen and tells him about her family, the story of her siblings is no longer hers to control. Their childhood becomes the basis for his wildly successful book, ultimately forcing them to come to terms with their losses, their guilt, and the deeply loyal connection they feel for one another.
(At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines...)
At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves. The story is told by Cyril’s son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother. The two wealthy siblings are thrown back into the poverty their parents had escaped from and find that all they have to count on is one another. It is this unshakeable bond between them that both saves their lives and thwarts their futures.
Ann Patchett is an American author whose novels often portray the intersecting lives of characters from disparate backgrounds. In addition to her novels, Patchett is also an author of some books of nonfiction and a children’s book.
Background
Ann Patchett was born on December 2, 1963, in Los Angeles, California, United States. She is the younger of two daughters of Frank Patchett and Jeanne Ray. When Ann Patchett was six years old, her parents divorced and her mother remarried, moving the family to Nashville, Tennessee.
Education
Ann Patchett attended St. Bernard Academy, a private Catholic school for girls in Nashville, Tennessee. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College in 1984 and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1987. She has also attended the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she wrote her first novel The Patron Saint of Liars.
Though Ann Patchett was widely published as a short-story writer and essayist, she became best known for her novels. Her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), tells the story of a young pregnant woman who leaves the husband she does not love to travel to a home for unwed mothers. There, as her feelings change and she creates a new family, so do her plans for the future. The novel was adapted as a television movie in 1997. In Taft (1994) the black manager of a blues bar who is mourning the loss of his son finds a new family when he hires a young white woman, Fay Taft, and becomes involved in the problems of her brother, Carl. Patchett also wrote a screen adaptation of the novel.
The Magician’s Assistant (1997) relates the discoveries of the widow of a homosexual magician named Parsifal. The woman, who also had been her husband’s assistant, visits the family he had never told her of and learns about his past. That same year Patchett was a Tennessee Williams Fellow in creative writing at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. She also held various appointments at other colleges and universities.
With her fourth novel, Bel Canto (2001), Patchett established her prominence among contemporary writers. The novel, set somewhere in South America, explores relationships between terrorists and hostages who, shut off from the rest of the world, find unexpected bonds. One of the hostages is a renowned operatic diva, and the music becomes the medium by which the characters in the novel communicate. In 2005 Patchett published her first full-length volume of nonfiction writing, Truth and Beauty, a memoir recounting her friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy, who died of a drug overdose in 2002.
Patchett returned to fiction with her next book, Run (2007), which explores the relationship between an ambitious father and his two sons. Issues of medical ethics and mortality are the focus of State of Wonder (2011), in which a pharmaceutical researcher travels to the Amazon Rainforest to investigate both the death of a colleague and a scientist’s work on an infertility drug. The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life (2011) was a brief e-book. Some of her previously published essays were collected in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (2013). In 2016 she released the autobiographical Commonwealth, a nonlinear novel about two families dealing with the effects of divorce.
Her most recent novel, The Dutch House (2019), is a fairy tale that follows two siblings who are deserted by their mother and left penniless by their stepmother. That same year she published her first children’s book, Lambslide, illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser. Patchett was also the editor of Best American Short Stories, 2006. In November 2011, she opened Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee, with her business partner Karen Hayes. She has since become a spokesperson for independent booksellers, championing books and bookstores on NPR, The Colbert Report, Oprah's Super Soul Sunday, The Martha Stewart Show, and The CBS Early Show, among many others.
(St. Elizabeth's, a home for unwed mothers in Habit, Kentu...)
1992
Politics
Donald Trump is the person who Ann Patchett most despises.
Views
Ann Patchett always swore she would never write an autobiographical novel.
She admires such contemporary writers as Zadie Smith, Colson Whitehead, Elizabeth Strout, Donna Tartt, and Michael Chabon.
She reads for sheer pleasure books by Kate DiCamillo.
The book Underground Airlines by Ben Winters changed her life. Ann Patchett sees the world differently now after reading it.
Quotations:
"I always, in every book, want to do something I haven’t done."
"I like a shifting point of view. That’s something that I really worked hard to master in my writing life, and I’m good at it, and I love doing it."
"I am in love with my house. It would be my final wish to have my ashes quietly deposited behind the garage."
"It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how."
"Never be so focused on what you're looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find."
"Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend, you drink your tea with, in the afternoon."
"Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves because the book puts us inside the character's skin."
"You are always someones favorite unfolding story."
Personality
Ann Patchett writes on a computer in the back garden, or in a spare bedroom.
She doesn’t read about herself online. She has an enormous amount of restraint where the Internet is concerned.
She was happiest before email was invented.
Her greatest fear is all the environmental stuff: the death of the oceans, things like that.
Her most treasured possession is her father’s wristwatch. He wore it every day and she wears it every day too.
The thing that she most dislikes about her appearance is that her eyes are uneven.
Her favorite word is a bumblebee.
Reading is relaxing for her. If she’s really tired she’ll look through cooking magazines. If she’s extremely tired she’ll just look at the pictures.
Connections
Ann Patchett married Karl VanDevender, a physician.