Ann Patchett: A Novel is Like a Dog
ANN PATCHETT, the novelist, was raised mostly in Nashville, Tennessee. She likes to experiment, and to be self-reliant. One recurring theme in her work is that letting go takes surprising energy and courage. Other themes are how much remains from a given-up Catholic childhood; how disrupted are children’s dreams by the mistakes of their parents; how rivals can never be vanquished, only outlasted; how both grim AND comic family vendettas can be; and the curious fact that people who are lost, and know it, quite often keep resolutely heading in the same direction.
Her father, from a working-class British immigrant family, became a cop in Los Angeles and a good one, or at least other cops thought so. Ann’s mother was a beauty, and one theme for Ann growing up was ‘What do conventional good looks get you — and what do they cost?’ She decided that the benefits of being gorgeous are obvious; and the drawbacks kind of sneak up on you.
Ann’s parents divorced. Her mother and her mother’s second husband took Ann and her siblings and moved all the way to Nashville. Today, Ann wishes that divorce could be the eighth sacrament, reminding us all that God still loves us, despite our mistakes, that there are endless second chances.
Nashville was wildly different from Los Angeles. In those days, the early ‘70’s, the Klan used to march downtown on Music Row on Sunday afternoons. Ann recalls robed and hooded Klansmen waving to her family car, in a friendly way, their left hands holding back enormous German shepherds. Ann and her sister would slink down in the back seat to try to avoid making eye contact with these Klansmen. Where did these Klansmen go? she wondered in later years. Many of them had been young; they must still be alive. What did they think now about their failure to be welcomed downtown?
Nashville in the ‘70’s was growing steadily, and canny businessmen bought acreage outside the city and held it, waiting for the city to come, waiting for a developer to buy their land for yet another sprawling housing development or golf course. The conventional view among Ann’s peers was to condemn the housing developments, to condemn the new Nashville, but Ann felt if modernity was making those Klansmen wary of parading around their bigotry, then it was worth a bunch of tacky condos.
Ann noted that Genealogy was king in Nashville — far more so than character. If someone from a good family did terrible things, well… they had a weakness and it was unfortunate. Their family would have to keep them out of trouble. But if someone was African-American, or from a “bad” family, they had very little leeway for doing wrong. Punishments for their mistakes were swift, harsh and final.
Ann always loved stories and had an instinct for how to tell them. By age six, she wanted to be a writer. But her grades in school were iffy. She was late to learn to read, late to learn to write. She had trouble making her letters correctly, and a poor sense of direction. Her father felt she should be “realistic” and suggested that when she grew up, she could be a dental hygienist.
Christmas was a trial every year. (“In my family, there were happy Thanksgivings, and tolerable Easters, but Christmas was a holiday we failed at with real vigor.”) Bu somehow writing about Christmas, or about anything awful, made it better, and put it in the past.
She went to college at Sarah Lawrence and was able to study with some superb writer-teachers: Grace Paley, Allan Gurganus, and Russell Banks. In those days, she wrote short stories, and adored the short story format. Gurganus ran a weekly fiction workshop with 14 students. He was hugely generous and had a magnificent office, with a fireplace, hardback editions of Chekhov in the bookcases, a framed photo of short story master John Cheever on the wall, and French doors leading out to a verdant garden.
He was hugely generous with his suggestions and his kindness; he was also firm in his belief that writing is about putting in the work, just as playing a musical instrument is about practicing on that instrument. Waiting for inspiration is a fool’s errand, said Allan Gurganus. Dreaming of a perfect first draft is silly. Writing is hard work.
He helped her to love her work. Ann had never loved her writing because the story she had in her mind — airy, unspecified — always had a feathery beauty which the first draft on the page did not. She’d always felt that, in the process of writing down the story, she’d ruined what was best in it. She assumed the only cure for this was to be so massively gifted that the story would still work after in being mauled, and hauled in, and nailed to the page.
But Gurganus told her there was a much easier, more realistic solution: to forgive herself for killing that ineffable beauty, to forgive herself for all of the things she wasn’t, and enjoy the solid essence of what she was. He also gave meticulous feedback in brown ink. He had thoughtful suggestions about what writers and books she might find helpful models. Professor Gurganus took appointments with his students seriously and was never late for an appointment.
Grace Paley was altogether different than Allan Gurganus — Ann might go to Grace’s office for an appointment and find a note on the door — GRACE HAS GONE TO CHILE TO PROTEST HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS. On one cold fall day Paley convened class, led them to a van, drove them to Times Square in New York, and instructed them to march on a Marine recruiting office chanting “USA, CIA, Out of Grenada!” Or if one student was terribly upset, Grace Paley might give that student an appointment twice as long, and bluntly tell the next student that her appointment was cancelled; her classmate was in greater need. Ann decided that Grace Paley was teaching young writers to have good character.
At the Iowa Writers Workshop, Ann wrote more short stories. One third of the class would love her story, one third would hate it, and one third would stare out the window. Ann wondered: ‘What are you thinking, you window-starers?’
She had arrived in Iowa City expecting to learn most when one of her stories was dissected. But she was so nervous and defensive when that happened, that she learned more from seeing other people’s work dissected. Having three people give different suggestions for how to improve a story felt to her like getting lost on the way to the Interstate, and having three different people give you their own personal way of finding the highway. She didn’t want that; she just wanted one smart, sensible person to help her find the highway.
Sometimes acquaintances or family friends would ask, ‘Why do you write short stories? Why not write a novel?’ As if a novel was more important because it was longer. Ann would reply, “If I played the violin, would you ask me why I don’t play the viola, because it’s bigger?”
But she started having furtive thoughts that maybe these people were right, that she should write a novel. In writing programs, short stories were king because they were so short, and easily managed. It would never work to have 14 people in a class writing full-length novels and expecting extensive feedback on every page. But now she wasn’t in a writing program anymore; she was in the world, and readers didn’t want to read short stories; they wanted novels. If she wanted to be a writer she should be able to write a novel.
She wrote her first novel: “The Patron Saint of Liars,” about a young woman who goes into labor in a Catholic home for unwed mothers, and other young mothers in general societal disgrace come to comfort her. All of the other young mothers have stories, and it was hard to imagine, and capture and write them all down, especially since Ann was waitressing at a TGI Fridays in Nashville as these stories were rapid-fire sparking in her mind, and there were a bunch of businessmen at table eight, frowning because they didn’t yet have their strawberry daiquiris.
“Bel Canto” (2001) changed things for Patchett. It sold very well, and suddenly she was quite able to support herself financially just by writing.
Ann had a deep, complex friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy. She wrote about that friendship in a short memoir called “Truth and Beauty.” In 2006, the book was adopted as mandatory reading for the freshman class at Clemson University, in small town South Carolina, and Clemson officials invited her to campus to make a speech. She accepted, and then forgot about it, just one more event in a busy schedule.
But it turned out that a Clemson alum with political ambitions named Ken Wingate was determined to make a stink about her visit to campus, and about the book she wrote. He decided that “Truth and Beauty” was encouraging young people to seek out pornography and sexual fetishes, and to scorn lives based in Christian faith.
The truth was that Ann thought “Truth and Beauty” erred on the side of being too bland and sweet. Lucy Grealy had been neither bland nor particularly sweet, though she was a vivid, remarkable friend. Ann had wanted to keep Lucy Grealy’s memory alive after Grealy died, and the result was a little saccharine. So being called out for evil tastes and seductive siren calls to the young was not only unpleasant but bizarre. And there were ominous threats to her safety if she came to Clemson. Ann was willing to take physical risks to her safety in order to enlighten Nashville, because that was her hometown. She wasn’t sure she wanted to do that for Clemson, South Carolina.
In the end she went, and endured a firestorm of criticism, and some tasteless audience questions in the Q and A. And then she wrote about it for the October 2007 edition of the Atlantic Monthly.
Like so many others who have hoped to achieve some degree of fame and renown, she realized too late that she’d underestimated its dark side. For one thing, there were the strangers who made an effort to meet her just to set Ann Patchett straight on an issue they happen to care about. Some felt an urge to tell her that parenthood is the highest form of love. Since she doesn’t want to have children, Ann groans inwardly when she hears that one. She squirms when people tell her, “I’m blessed!” It sounds to Ann a lot like: “God likes me more than he likes poor people! God protects me, because he prefers me!”
One of the most annoying things such people tell Ann is: “Everyone has one great novel in them.” After “Bel Canto” came out, it felt as if they were telling her they could have written “Bel Canto” too; they just hadn’t gotten around to it.
“Mmm-hmmm,” Ann would murmur.
“And do you know WHY everyone has one great novel in them?” the other person would say, if Ann gave them even the slightest encouragement. “Because we each have the story of our own life to tell.” Right, Ann would say, through gritted teeth.
She opened her own bookstore, Parnassus Books in Nashville.
She’s had a biological father, two stepfathers, two husbands, and has tried earnestly and well to learn something substantial from all five of these disparate men. Her second husband, Karl VanDevender, is a doctor, and a real keeper.
Patchett has some interesting views about writing. She says doing research for a novel is great fun but also deeply dangerous because it’s so respectable a way of procrastinating. She agrees with Allan Gurganus that a writer needs the ability, the willingness, to forgive herself or himself. Because, she says, you will fail over and over before you succeed in writing a novel worth reading.
She also says a novel is a like a dog — “beautifully oblivious” to how much money you have in the bank. Expecting a novel to financially support you makes no more sense than expecting your dog to financially support you. Both dogs and novels have great personalities and enjoy keeping you company — but making money for you is not part of the deal.