A Conversation with Ann Patchett
By Yvonne Conza
“You might not see how everything threads together as you read along, but when you look back from the end of the story, the map becomes clear.” —Ann Patchett, from These Precious Days
In Ann Patchett’s most recent essay collection, These Previous Days, her attention to memory invites readers to explore what it means to be seen as “our best and most complete selves.” The collection hosts practical advice on clearing out clutter (“How to Practice”), meditations on the publishing process (“To the Doghouse”), and intimate musings on marriage (“Flight Plan”). Throughout, Patchett calls for an embrace of life’s unpredictability and brings forth the brilliance that can be found in such imperfection. Writer Yvonne Conza spoke with the author recently about time, losing a friend, and putting life in order.
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How do you approach time in your writing? In “Three Fathers,” an essay about the love and influence that your biological father, your stepfather, Mike, and Darrell, your mother’s third husband, had on your life, you write:
But the story I want to tell begins just after the wedding was over and before the reception began, while the photographs were being taken. Or it happened months before that, when I first realized all three fathers were going to be at Heather’s wedding—the family equivalent of a total solar eclipse. I wanted a picture of that.
Here you stepped away from a simple chronological telling, and moved into narration through memory. Do you believe time operates differently in essays than it does in novels?
I’m obsessed with time. I used to say most writers are, but really I think most people are. Time is less flexible in novels than it is in essays. In a novel, I figure out a time structure and stick with it, but essays are smaller and each one is different. I figure out how time will operate in each essay, and it can be different in each one. I don’t need to figure out a consistent time structure for the entire book.
Without being beholden to linear constraints, you knit moments, years, and occasions throughout the collection—amplifying patterns, dropping stitches, and collaging things. In the essay, “How Knitting Saved My Life. Twice,” you write: “I wanted something wider, a little looser.” This seems to hold kinship to your treatment of time in this collection.
It does. I don’t know that I would have realized it without you saying it, but it seems exactly right.
Why did you choose to write that essay’s title as two sentences?
It’s audacious to say that knitting saved my life. To say it did so twice is nearly ridiculous. Having it in two sentences underscores the ridiculousness.
The collection’s structural movements pivot from an emotional, rather than a chronological, arrangement. How did that help you to find and then tell the story?
Imagine a pile of essays spread out across the floor. Imagine me crawling around, moving them from place to place. I put them in a series of lines. I move them around. Some essays don’t fit, even if they’re good, so I take those out. I write other essays to fill the space. Because I’m the one person writing, and I’m writing from my own experience, they snap together fairly easily. The emotional arrangement is just the emotional arrangement of my brain, the leaps that seem clear to me.
How important is the unpredictable moment within a piece of writing?
The unpredictable moment is the thing that inspires me to write the essay. For example, I was cleaning out my house not because I wanted to write an essay or learn something about myself; I was cleaning out because I wanted to know where things were and not hold onto things we never used. The glasses, the dolls, the plates with chickadees on them, all made me think, gosh, this is strange, but I still wasn’t thinking about an essay. The essay “How to Practice” came when my sister’s friend Megan arrived with her daughter Charlotte. When I realized Charlotte wanted a typewriter and I was willing to give her mine, everything clicked into focus. When Karl, my husband, then told me he had an extra typewriter, the piece could have written itself. So the answer is: the unpredictable moment is important.
This collection is conscious about how fleeting life is while living it—more an exploration of life than about writing. Yet it’s artful and accomplished. What do you think is art’s purpose?
To comfort or disturb or enlighten or educate or entertain or make a record of a time or event or celebrate or grieve or record or to create a culture for the good of the people. It’s anyone’s guess.
Transitions within and between essays are spectacular in this book. What, for you, has to exist in the transitional space from one essay to another?
Again, go back to the image of me crawling around on the floor, moving piles of paper. I didn’t write these essays for them to stand in relation to one another. I wrote each one because there was something that interested me, moved me. After that, I organized them. It’s very different from writing a novel. In a novel, those spaces between the chapters are intentional, but it’s one piece of work.
In the essay “These Precious Days,” you mention “cause” and “effect” being much clearer in novels than in life. When does “cause” and “effect” come into play in developing and putting an essay collection together?
When I put this book together and read it through, I thought, This is a book about death, and some of the enormous joys there are before we die. I didn’t set out to write that book, but it comes up again and again. In a novel, I’m actually shaping a plot; I’m thinking it all out first. The essays are about my life, my interests. It’s much less planned.
You invited visual artist Sooki Raphael into your home during the pandemic. She was undergoing cancer treatment at the time. Did having her there influence the collection’s shape and form?
No, the shape and form of the book came after Sooki had left. When she was here, I was writing things to entertain myself while being stuck at home and not writing fiction. I was working for the sake of working; I wasn’t writing a book.
In what ways did writing this essay collection test you?
I have to say, writing essays is almost always a pleasure. There are no time constraints; nothing is owed to anyone. I never get tired of an essay when I’m in the middle of writing. I’m looking at something closely because I’m interested in it. The essay “These Precious Days,” also the title of this collection, was so long, and it was hard to find my way into talking about Sooki and how much I loved her, but if I was going to sit at my desk all day, day after day, struggling with how best to express my love for Sooki, well, that’s a pretty great use of time.
Was there a kind of collaboration between Sooki Raphael and you on the essay “These Precious Days”?
There was a collaboration between Sooki and me in the essay itself. She read endless drafts. She came back with specific memories. I wrote it for the two of us, and if she hadn’t wanted anyone else to read it, that would have been fine with me. She was also so much more than a collaborator on the cover. She sat through many Zoom meetings with me and the art department at HarperCollins, getting the colors on the jacket just right. I collaborated with her on her art show. So we were each helping the other with our work without actually making something together.
You and Sooki Raphael both developed and nurtured projects during the pandemic. It seems like your friendship made it possible for each of you to live your own individual life with more vibrancy and clarity. How can this synergy of spirit be carried on when someone close to us dies?
That’s like saying, Tell me how to love. Everyone does it in his or her own way. I feel very fortunate that I can write my emotions down, that I can write what happened down. It’s like pressing a flower in a book. I’m glad I wrote about Sooki, that I paid attention, asked questions, sent her all those drafts to read, because I made a portrait of her both to share and to keep. Honestly, I wonder sometimes how people bear to carry all their emotions with them, to not have a place to settle them. When I was out in California with Sooki before she died, she said to me, and her friends Patty and Georgienne, “Look for me in the hummingbirds.” There have been more hummingbirds this summer than I’ve seen in my entire life, and every single time I see one, I think, Sooki, I remember, I see you. I’m so grateful for that.
Read more about Patchett’s work on her website.
About the author:
Yvonne Conza’s writing has appeared in Longreads, The Believer, Los Angeles Review of Books, and BOMBMagazine. She is working on an essay collection and a novel.
