NPR's Scott Simon and author Ann Patchett on the Ties That Bind | Rotary Voices Podcast

From Rotary Magazine, this is the Rotary Voices podcast. I'm Scott Simon. Few contemporary novelists have captured the complexities of family, friendship, and the ties that bind as beautifully as Ann Patchett. Over the past three decades, she has become one of America's most celebrated writers, earning the Penn Faulkner Award for her novel Bel Canto. The 2019 book The Dutch House was named a finalist of the Pulitzer Prize, and her memoirs and essays have explored friendship, marriage, grief, and her writing life. Ann also owns a bookstore, Parnassus Books, in Nashville. She's become a passionate advocate for books, authors, free speech, and independent bookstores. Her newest novel, Whistler, is a deeply moving story about memory, family, and the people who shape our lives, even if they're with us only briefly. At the heart is an unexpected reunion between a woman and the stepfather she loved as a child. And like so much of Ann Patchett's work, Whistler reminds us that kindness, love, and friendship often become the forces that make us who we are. Those themes resonate in a special way with Rotary. Ann's father, Frank Patchett, was a longtime Rotarian, and in a touching essay she wrote for Rotary magazine in 2014, she reflected on what Rotary meant to him. And while she praised Rotary's historic effort to eradicate polio, she argued that the organization's greatest achievement might be the lifelong bonds that grow from serving others together. Ann Patchett, thanks so much for joining us on the Rotary Voices podcast. Oh, Scott, so good to see you and good to hear your voice. Well, so good to see you and hear your voice. Could I get you...I want to talk about that Rotary connection just at the beginning. Your father was, I think it's safe to say, a legendary Los Angeles police captain who arrested Charles Manson, among other distinctions. And your sister was also a member. What did Rotary mean in your family? Service and connection. So after my father and stepmother retired, and they were no longer living in Los Angeles, they moved to a little town called Fallbrook, California. And my father immediately joined the Rotary there, and he had many healthy, happy years as a Rotary member. And then he developed a disease called progressive supranuclear palsy. And it's a degenerative neurological disease, a little like Parkinson's, but faster. And he was in a wheelchair and really seriously disabled and always went to Rotary. My stepmother had a van, had a motorized wheelchair, and he would go to the Rotary meetings. And one of the things about progressive supranuclear palsy is you can grab someone's hand, but it's almost impossible to let go. You have to pry the person's hand off your hand. And I can remember going to those Rotary lunches with my dad and people coming over to shake his hand, and then not being able to get their hand back. And they were all just fine with it. They were so patient and so kind and would come and sit with us. And that's one of those cases where the chips are completely down and you know who your friends are. And those people from Rotary were still very much his friends. My father grew up, as my sister and I did, in the Catholic church and raised by priests and nuns who really reinforced the idea that we are put here to serve one another in a community. And he didn't always stick with the church, but he found that element of service and community in Rotary. It was kind of like the very best of the Catholic church that you could meet with once a week for lunch. Yeah, the church isn't necessarily known for its weekly lunches, I guess. Right. Well, potluck sometimes in the basement of churches. And I want to ask you about Whistler, this wonderful novel that's out now. How would you describe Whistler for those listening today? So Daphne Fuller is 53 years old. She and her husband Jonathan are spending the day in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Jonathan notices that someone is following them and looking at Daphne. And after they try to give him a shake, he goes to talk to this man, and it turns out to be Eddie Triplett, who was Daphne's stepfather, who she hasn't seen since she was nine years old. And as the book unfolds, it's about Daphne and Eddie's past, their present, and their future together. What is set off in them when they recognize each other? Just a wave of emotion, a wave of everything that has been suppressed. Because when Eddie left Daphne's life through no choice of his own, Daphne's mother divorced him and banished him. And she had no recourse as a child to hold on to that relationship. A lot of people have said to me, why didn't she track him down? Why didn't she find him? But I think that's a very modern notion of what children are capable of doing on the internet. And back when we were young, if your parents said this person is gone, they were gone. And there was really nothing to do but lock your feelings away and move on with your life. So when she sees Eddie again, and realizes who he is, just a huge, huge rush of feelings for him and about their past come back to her. Well, they were, without getting too specific, they were a part of the same family unit for only a little, like about a year. But they did share an intense experience, didn't they? Right. They were in a car accident together. So when Daphne's sister is in the hospital, Eddie is taking care of Daphne, and they were in a car accident on a snowy night, went down a hill into a ravine, and no one knew that they were missing. And they were really in a lot of trouble. And they are in this car together. And that scene of that experience comes up throughout the book and sort of develops in a parallel way with their present story. Speaking of their present story, Eddie's at an important point in his life in particular, isn't he? He is. Well, he's thinking about retiring. He's thinking about his health and his future. But Eddie's a happy guy. And he has a lot of friends. He's greatly beloved. And he is enjoying his life, and he's enjoying his work. And meeting Daphne is not filling a hole in his life. It is expanding forward into an even greater life. And what about Daphne? Is it a hole, or is she rediscovering a part of herself that she had kind of sealed off? I think it's more rediscovering. I think that Daphne is a happy and well-adjusted person. And I think that what she comes to realize over the course of the novel is that a lot of that has to do with her relationship with Eddie. That it was brief, but that if there is one person in your life as a child who really loves you and sees you and understands you, that even if it's not a long relationship, it can set the course for your life. And it could have been a teacher, a neighbor, the parent of a friend. I just decided to make it a banished stepfather. Well, and inevitably it occurred to me, I think the wonderful article you did for The New Yorker a couple of years ago on what I'll refer to as your blended stepfamily, the exact language escapes me at the moment, but your parents divorced when you were young, your mother subsequently remarried. There were three, a father and a stepfather. A father and two stepfathers. Two stepfathers, right, who were significant in your life. Inevitably, I have to wonder to what degree did that work in your creative process? Well, it worked in so far as I know what it's like to have a stepfather and to be very close to one stepfather, but boy, oh boy, this is not my stepfather. And so, yes, I am drawing on experiences, but it's not the same. In the same way, I was in a car accident when I was a child. My sister and I were in a very bad car accident, and when I gave my sister the manuscript of the book and she started to read it, she got to the car accident scene and she put it down and she said, she called me and she was like, I'm sorry, I just have no interest in reading about this car accident. And then later, picked the book up again and called me and she said, oh my gosh, this isn't our car accident at all. And so that's kind of the way it is. Yes, I understand how significant a stepparent can be, how significant a car accident can be. When I was a child, I believed every person would be in a terrible car accident at some point in their life, and I had just gotten mine out of the way. And so, yes, you're drawing on experience, but the characters are having a different relationship to those experiences. Let me ask you about perhaps a happier shared experience, because as we said, Whistler begins with a chance encounter at the Met. You and your friend Marty Fisher, a student, a friend from Sarah Lawrence College, recently returned to the Met in a video featured in YouTube, if I'm not mistaken. Right, that the Met made. It's a series called Meet Me at the Met. And I'm struck by this particular sentence from it. Art happens not from the artist or the writer or the reader or the viewer, but it's chemistry. It's like love. Yes. Well, how do you create that chemistry? Well, you can't in the same way that you can't create the chemistry of love by yourself. You bring your half, and it's always amazing to me as a writer. I can get a horrible review of a book that I've written, and the next day I get a review that says this is the best book I've ever read. And I know as a bookseller that there are books that one person loves and one person hates. The book doesn't change, right? What changes is the chemistry between the reader and the book. There are books that I loved so much when I was young, and I've gone back and read them again as an adult and not like them at all. And also the inverse is true. Books that I couldn't get through when I was young. Moby Dick. How many times did I try to read Moby Dick when I was young? Could not do it. I finally read Moby Dick. I didn't mean to interrupt you, but the whale did it. But go ahead. I was, I think, 35 when I finally read Moby Dick. And sure enough, it was the greatest novel of all time. But I couldn't get through it. So it is the chemistry. It's the timing. It is like love. But of course, you're a writer. This is your livelihood. Yes. You've got to have something coming up and be working on something. Well, I guess at this point in your, you've had such a fantastic success. If you decided to step away, you could. But for many writers, they have to keep on going, don't they? How do they find that chemistry? Well, you know, all we can do on our end is to do the best work we know how to do. And I don't think that a lot of people are doing it just to pay the bills. They're doing it because this is their life and we're so lucky to get to do it. It is absolutely a calling of the heart when it's going well. Let me ask you about the dedication of the book. I wish you would. Well, a man named Jim Fox. Yes. Who is no longer with us. Yes. Tell us about Jim Fox, if you could. So Jim Fox was one of the best friends I ever had in my life. And he died on his 85th birthday a little over two years ago. He was the head legal counsel at HarperCollins Publisher, which is where I publish. And in, I think it was probably 2003, I was having some legal problems with a book that I was working on. And I was sent to Jim Fox, like being sent to the principal. And we became friends. And then we became great friends. And it seems almost a miracle. I look back on that and I think, how did that happen? That we were talking on the phone about legal problems. And the next thing I knew, he said, you know, I've got a house in Sag Harbor. Why don't you come up and spend some time with me? And we'll read and we'll talk about books. He said, when you're here, we'll discuss Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie and Henry James, the Ambassadors. And I said, oh, okay. All right. And I immediately read them both and brought my copies and I went to Sag Harbor. It seems crazy to me that I did this. And when I got there, I was like, okay, I'm ready. Let's talk about these books. And he laughed. He said, do you have no sense of humor? I was joking. I didn't mean that we were actually going to be talking about Dreiser over dinner, but we did. And Jim was my reading soulmate. If he hated a book, I hated it. If he loved a book, I loved it. One hundred percent of the time, we were in agreement. And when Jim was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he decided that what he wanted to do before he died was read Ulysses. And he got a group together with a couple of friends and very methodically met every week. And just before he died, he finished Ulysses, which I have not done. But that's the kind of guy he was, a person with a great sense of humor who wanted to read Ulysses before he died. Well, I'm sorry. One of the pivotal scenes of the book, Eddie says to Daphne, let me consult the words again. There are so many people who are going to want to help you. And it occurred to me when I saw those words, we don't read that in a lot of contemporary literature. Well, and yet it's true. And it's certainly true of Eddie. Everybody loved Eddie. Everybody wanted to help him and be with him. He had so many friends. But also, I see it so much in life. And it's something I've thought a lot about with this book, that if you look at the world from a distance, it is a boiling morass. And if you look at the world that you actually live in up close, so much goodness. In the grocery store, I mean, I'm on book tour right now. I'm on a plane every day. And every day I see people saying, can I get your bag down for you? I mean, not to me necessarily. Waiting. Do you need any help? Can I help you with that baby? Can I help you carry your stroller? Can I help you? Just the kindness, the really small acts of kindness that people show one another, which I think is also what's very well represented in Rotary. A club of people getting together and saying, how can we be kind? How can we help? Let's put our heads together and not only be nice to each other as a group getting together, but also how can we look out to the larger world and figure out polio, water supplies, things that we can do to help others. It also occurred to me in reading Whistler, but not just Whistler, some of our most important relationships in life don't have an easy label. Friendships, yes. Stepfather is a term, but it doesn't cover everything. I knew my stepfather longer than I knew my father, arguably was at least as important or maybe even more an important influence. The term stepfather just doesn't cover it. I don't feel the need to come up with new words, but maybe we have to come up with a heightened appreciation for the way we are surrounded in life by relationships that can enrich us. Well, and also to pay special attention to those relationships that have words associated with them that make us jump to conclusions. No word like stepfather or stepmother makes us jump to conclusions. If you say, this is about a young girl who was trapped in a car overnight with her stepfather when she was nine years old, where do we go? We go straight to Lolita. To say, it's not what you think. I dropped step from my stepfather relationship, and it used to amuse us both when people would say to us, yes, I can see the resemblance. Absolutely. Absolutely. I have that with my stepmother all the time, and when I go to visit her and she always says, this is my daughter. We have the same last name, of course, and we actually do look alike, but it's a sense of pride and honor for both of us that we are associated together. Something I wanted to ask you about that turned up in research, I want to ask you about the vow you and your friend, Kate DiCamillo, the great author for young readers, I guess you made a vow during Lent to give up swearing. Oh, yeah. And it worked out? Yeah. And it was oddly, it's been really life-changing, and that was before Tom Lake. Tom Lake, one of your great novels, yes. Oh, thank you very much. But we decided to practice right speech, which is the larger understanding. Right speech is when you lock yourself out of the house, you don't say, I'm such an idiot. I dropped a glass the other day, a really, really beautiful glass, and I stood there for a minute and I just thought, what a great glass. How lucky am I that I got to spend these years with that glass? That shift, that if you're in the car and somebody cuts you off, you're not yelling at them in the car. The change that this 40-day experiment made in our lives was unbelievable. That not only did we have such a sense of peace, but also the need to think more deeply about how we were feeling. If you're not just screaming about something, but you can stop and say, how do I actually feel? If I take those words out, how do I actually feel? So how this is now affecting my life is when I was going on book tour three years ago for Tom Lake, I decided, okay, I have always hated book tour. And I have complained bitterly and publicly about the fact that I don't like sleeping in hotels and I never get any food and being on a plane every day is terrible. And I always wind up getting sick. And I thought, I've done this for years. I've been on tour since 1992. I am putting that to rest. And now I am going to talk about what's great about book tour. And when people say, are you enjoying book tour? I'm going to say, yes, I am. Because I am supporting the ecosystems of bookstores, because readers come out, not only to talk about my book, but to connect with one another. And we are together promoting reading and talking about other authors. It has changed my life. And now I am on book tour again. All that hard work has stuck with me. And, and I am happy. I am having a great time on book tour. And I am incredibly grateful. And that was because Katie Camillo and I made a decision four years ago to stop swearing. Good for you both. I had to hold myself back from an expletive. Does it ever become tough? Does it ever become tiresome to be so thoughtful though? No, it doesn't. And another thing that I think about a lot is that anger, bitterness, complaining, like swearing, it's a low hanging fruit. It's so easy to say how horrible things are. And it makes us feel smart and cool to be jaded and to talk about how terrible everything is. I got an out of office message the other day, I sent someone an email. And in the out of office message, it said, I hope you are doing as well as can be expected given these horrible times. Oh my. And I just thought, in your out of office email? Seriously? Yes, horrible times and wonderful times. I was in Minneapolis a few nights ago giving a talk, 800 people in a church. And at the end, I stood up and was saying thank you to the city of Minneapolis. I started to cry. Just how astonishing, how astonishing the people in that city are, who are doing exactly what the nuns taught us to do. Be responsible for the people in your community. See everyone as your family. Know that the poor and the downtrodden belong to you, and you belong to them. To live that every day, perhaps at the cost of your own life? Yeah. What a beautiful world this is when a whole city can do something like that. I confess, every now and then theatrically, I complain about something on book tour, but I really like book tour. And I don't, obviously, nearly as much as you. But I mean, what's not to like? People come up to you, they say nice things. What made you open Parnassus Books in 2011? The bookstores had closed and somebody had to do it. But you know, I'm the owner now. My partner retired five years ago. I bought her out. I own that bookstore. Yes, I do. Why did you buy it twice, or whatever the term of art would be? We opened it. So that means we took over a tanning salon in a strip mall, and I took out all the tanning beds. I thought I'd been there before when I came there. Now it's coming back to me. Now it's all coming back. It was tan 2000. And you don't want to live in a city that doesn't have a bookstore. That's the long and the short of it. And I thought of it as a civic responsibility. And it has turned into an enormous joy. I mean, really the great joy of my life. And I have done more for the humanities in this country as a bookseller than I will ever do as a writer. Give us some idea of what that entails. Because there's so many books that come out, only so many you can put on the shelves. And these days, you've also got to make room for coffee mugs. I believe, in fact, I even have one. I know I have one from Parnassus Books. And blackwing pencils and greeting card. You have to make a thousand different practical decisions in any given period of time, don't you? No, I have to make just a couple of practical decisions, which is who to hire. And I hire spectacular, smart, great people who then go out and that's their job. And they execute all of those decisions. And they are wonderful. I am not a micromanager. I really trust these people. And the other thing is, because I have a robust career as a novelist, all of the profits that that bookstore makes are divided equally, I will underline that word, equally among the staff. So quarterly profit share, if you are working the cash register, or you are the head manager of the store, you get the same amount of profit every quarter. And that's what we do. I thought everybody seemed very spirited. You're very happy. Yeah. Well, we want to thank our good friend, the great novelist Ann Patchett, and the great bookseller and voice for creative expression in this country, Ann Patchett. Thank you so much for joining us today on this Rotary Voices podcast. Thanks so much. I appreciate it, Scott. And it's always good to talk to you.