Ann Patchett

Author

• Born: December 2, 1963
• Place of Birth: Los Angeles, California

Biography

Ann Patchett’s novels have achieved both critical and commercial success. She was born in Los Angeles to Frank Patchett, a police captain, and Jeanne Wilkinson Ray, a nurse. Her parents divorced when she was three. When Patchett was six, her mother moved with her and her sister to Nashville, Tennessee. There, Patchett attended Catholic schools.

She entered Sarah Lawrence College in New York intending to be a poet, but while taking a fiction writing course with novelist Allan Gurganus, she realized her true interest was fiction. Her first short story, “All Little Colored Children Should Learn to Play the Harmonica,” was published in the Paris Review when she was twenty-one. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1984. The following year, she attended the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 1987, she completed her Master of Fine Arts there.

While doing some teaching, Patchett managed, for the most part, to focus on her writing. She was a writer-in-residence at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania from 1988 to 1989 but left there when she and her husband separated after one year of marriage. They subsequently divorced. In 1989, she was a residential fellow at the Yaddo and Millay writers’ colonies. She returned to Nashville and worked as a restaurant server for a time. Winning the James A. Michener/Copernicus Award for a work in progress and a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, enabled her to complete The Patron Saint of Liars. In 1992, she was a visiting assistant professor at Murray State University in Kentucky. She earned a fellowship from the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College in 1993 and a Guggenheim Fellowship the following year. In 1997, she was a Tennessee Williams fellow in Creative Writing at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee.

In addition to her novels, Patchett published short stories in Columbia, Seventeen, Southern Review, New Madrid, Epoch, and the Iowa Review. She also contributed essays to GQ, Vogue, Outside, and the New York Times and published the essay collection This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage in 2013. From Patchett’s first publication, her work has been honored. The Patron Saint of Liars (1992) was named a New York Times Notable Book in 1992. It was adapted as a television movie for CBS in 1998. Taft won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the Best Work of Fiction in 1994. Both books have Southern settings, but her next two works were located out of the region. In 2014, after Nashville lost its last in-town bookstore, she opened a bookstore of her own, Parnassus Books.

The Magician’s Assistant (1997), set in California and Nebraska, began as a short story, “The Magician’s Assistant’s Dream,” winner of the Editor’s Choice Award for Fiction in Columbia: A Magazine of Prose and Poetry in 1987. The idea for the short story and novel came to Patchett when she visited a magic show with her father. In 1997, the year of the novel’s release, Patchett was named the Nashville Banner’s Tennessee Writer of the Year. Bel Canto (2002), loosely inspired by the seizing of the Japanese embassy in Lima, Peru, by terrorists, received the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. In 2002, Bel Canto was awarded the Orange Prize for Fiction, Europe’s annual book award for the best book by a woman author.

Patchett may be studied as a Southern novelist and also as one who employs elements of the fantastic. Specifically, Patchett’s novels focus on lonely or emotionally damaged people who ultimately manage to reconnect with others. For example, in The Patron Saint of Liars, Son Abbott escapes a personal tragedy to arrive at St. Elizabeth’s, a Catholic home for unwed mothers, where he becomes the handyperson. His marriage to Rose allows him to raise Rose’s daughter Sissy and love her as his own. Throughout the novels, Patchett credibly and subtly explores the internal lives of diverse characters. In Taft (2004), for instance, the protagonist is John Nickel, a Black American ex-drummer who manages a bar in Memphis and is trying to reconcile with his son and his son’s mother after failing to marry her.

As noted before, Patchett’s novels can be categorized as realistic, though she also explores some experiences that transcend everyday reality. The experience may be a miracle, an exercise in the imagination, a dream, or even an aesthetic encounter. Dreams help Sabine, the title character in The Magician’s Assistant, come to terms with her grief for the magician Parsifal. The aesthetic experience of music unites the diverse group of characters in Bel Canto. As a hostage situation drags on for months, opera star Roxane Coss’s singing builds bridges among the hostages, who speak a variety of languages, and between the captors and their captives.

Patchett's next book, Run (2007), features a white New England politician, Bernard Doyle, who adopts two Black American brothers. As the family is returning home from a Jesse Jackson lecture, one of the boys is saved from being hit by a car by a mysterious woman, who is herself struck and taken to the hospital. Her young daughter, Kenya, then comes to stay with the Doyles. The book centers on the question of the woman's identity and her relation to the Doyle family. The novel's critical reception was lukewarm compared to her previous efforts, with many feeling that the attempts to address race and class were shallow, but critics praised the book's lyrical writing style and its handling of themes of love, growth, and family.

In 2011, Patchett published State of Wonder, which follows a pharmacologist, Marina Singh, on a journey to Brazil to investigate the mysterious death of a coworker and learn about secretive research being conducted on a supposed miracle drug. The book was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, among others, and was a New York Times bestseller. In 2014, Patchett won the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, a career achievement award recognizing a "major contribution to the field of literature and letters." Her seventh novel, Commonwealth (2016), deals with two divorcing couples and the six children of a newly formed blended family over fifty years. Commonwealth received critical acclaim and was named a notable book of 2016 by the New York Times. Patchett also published The Dutch House (2019) and Tom Lake (2023), as well as a book of essays titled These Precious Days: Essays in 2021. Patchett has also written children’s books including Lambslide (2019), Escape Goat (2020), and The Verts: A Story of Introverts and Extroverts (2024). In 2024, Patchett was honored with the Carl Sandburg Literary Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation. A sense of optimism characterizes Patchett's work. While tragedies may occur, her characters can and do make positive life changes. The novels end in possibility and hope.

Author Works

Long Fiction

The Patron Saint of Liars, 1992

Taft, 1994

The Magician’s Assistant, 1997

Bel Canto, 2001

Run, 2007

State of Wonder, 2011

Commonwealth, 2016

The Dutch House, 2019

Tom Lake, 2023

Nonfiction

Truth & Beauty: A Friendship, 2004

What Now?, 2008

The Getaway Car, 2011

This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, 2013

These Precious Days: Essays, 2021

Bibliography

Allardice, Lisa, and Ann Patchett. “'In a World that Is Going to Hell, There Is still so much Joy': Ann Patchett on Finding Happiness.” The Guardian, 22 July 2023, www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/22/in-a-world-that-is-going-to-hell-there-is-still-so-much-joy-ann-patchett-on-finding-happiness. Accessed 11 July 2024.

Muchnik, Laurie. “Talking with Ann Patchett: A Lyric Voice.” New York Newsday, 8 July 2001, p. B11.

Patchett, Ann. “Ann Patchett: The Novelist as Magician.” Interview by Elizabeth Bernstein. Publishers Weekly, 13 Oct. 1997, pp. 52–53.

Patchett, Ann. "The Bookstore Strikes Back." The Atlantic, Dec. 2012, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/the-bookstore-strikes-back/309164. Accessed 9 July 2024.

Patchett, Ann. "In Bad Relationships, 'There Comes a Day When You Gotta Go.'" Interview by Terry Gross. Fresh Air. NPR, 23 Jan. 2014, www.npr.org/2014/10/24/358348676/patchett-in-bad-relationships-there-comes-a-day-when-you-gotta-go. Accessed 9 July 2024.

Patchett, Ann. “The Sacrament of Divorce.” Women on Divorce: A Bedside Companion. Edited by Penny Kaganoff and Susan Spano. Harcourt Brace, 1995.

Polk, James. “Captive Audience.” New York Times, 10 June 2001, p. 37.

Sittenfeld, Curtis. "Ann Patchett's Latest Novel Follows Six Siblings over 50 Years." Review of Commonwealth, by Ann Patchett. The New York Times, 15 Sept. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/books/review/ann-patchett-commonwealth.html. Accessed 9 July 2024.

Watts, James D. "Ann Patchett Is 2014 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award Recipient." Tulsa World, 30 Mar. 2014, www.tulsaworld.com/scene/books/ann-patchett-is-peggy-v-helmerich-distinguished-author-award-recipient/article‗84550fb3-5f08-55d6-b7de-57b95ac25d4d.html. Accessed 9 July 2024.