Q & A with Ann Patchett
Click here
to listen to Ann Patchett's reading of Truth and Beauty
as well as the question and answer session transcribed below.
The question is: what made me pick the title Truth and
Beauty?
And the answer is while I was writing this book it was titled
Dearest to Me. Never match “t”s: “dearest”
to “to.” By the time I finished the book I hated
the title, which I thought was a bad sign for the rest of
my life with this book. My publisher really liked it and I
kept trying frantically to come up with something else. I
literally came up with Truth and Beauty in the middle
of the night. At nine o’clock the next morning the cover
was going out and there was no turning back. I really got
it in under the wire.
Even though I’d read Autobiography of a Face
at least probably half a dozen times while I was writing the
book, I didn’t realize, until six months later, that,
in fact, I had plagiarized it. (Isn’t that sweet?) Because
we did plagiarize from each other so seamlessly. I love that
fact.
I don’t know what it means, you know? Every now and
then someone will say, “So, are you Truth or are you
Beauty?” I don’t know. It’s true; we did
talk about it all the time. Lucy had this whole thing about
“If I can’t be beauty or beautiful with a small-case
‘b,’ then I’m going to be Beauty, capital
‘B’” And, “What is the meaning of
Beauty? What is the meaning of Truth?” That really was
our great discussion in life and we never got tired of what
things meant and what the purpose of art meant. Somehow Truth
and Beauty really seemed to personify that for me . .
. and is just so much better than Dearest to Me.
The question is: [the audience member] said at one
point I tell Lucy it’s easier to write truths than fiction.
Did I find this to be the case when writing this book?
Absolutely.
People say to me all the time: “This must have been
such a hard book for you to write?” Oh. No. It was a
snap. It was great because it gave me a way to stay with her
and process it; I wrote it right after she died. It was a
passionate and immediate thing. I always say, it’s like
the book was written and somebody shoved it through a paper
shredder. And what I did in those months was reassemble it.
With a novel: novel writing is so hard for me, and
everything that’s not writing a novel is unbelievably
easy. I do magazine work and all sorts of things. People are
always saying, “Does it conflict if you write an article?
Does it conflict with your novel writing?” It’s
like going to the grocery store compared to writing a novel,
because there’s so many questions in writing a novel:
where does the story start? where does it end? who are your
characters? where do they go? what do they do? I knew all
of those answers [with Truth and Beauty. Where does
it start? The day we meet. Where does it end? The day she
dies. What do we do in between? We go here, here, and here.
It wasn’t painful because it was a pleasure to remember
her. It was painful for me to look back on my own life and
to see myself in youth, just because I don’t like to
look back. But, compared to writing a novel: anyday.
I have this thing that I call “Tara Lipinski Skating
Figure Eights.” That’s how nonfiction is for me.
The question is: Bell Canto is a novel that
takes place in a static environment with one group of people
in one location; did I go as stir crazy as my characters?
No. Now, if I was looking into my own psychology I would say,
“I don’t go stir crazy.” My ability to sit
in one place and do one thing is breathtaking. I mean, it’s
funny but it’s not; that’s the genius, that’s
my genius as a writer. And when people say to me, as they
do constantly, “Oh, I want to be a writer. I wish I
was a writer. I want to write,” I think a lot of people
are smart enough to do it, and a lot of people are talented
enough to do it, but I think there are precious few people
who know how to nail their butt in a chair and cut themselves
off from everything and stay on point with one thing.
I did the audio book for Truth and Beauty; I loved
doing it so much that I want to be an audio book star. I want
to record other people’s audio books. I’m not
joking! I actually talk to them about this all the time. I
love it. You’re in a box—all day—that’s
sound proof and nothing can come into the box. The producers
were like, “Well everyone just gets so buggy and they
freak out and run screaming.” There was some rap star
who was doing a book, and he did it for, like, three minutes
and he said, “I gotta go for a smoke.” And he
never came back. And he left his sunglasses there. And they
still wore them. They were great jokes.
But . . . that’s my thing: I am still. So, a book about
people who are still? No, not a problem. The other thing is:
my whole life is a quest to plagiarize The Magic Mountain
(Thomas Mann). That book is probably the most important book
to me, which is a book about a tuberculosis sanitorum in Switzerland
in the ‘20s, where basically they just lie in fur sleeping
bags all day and take their temperature. And every book I’ve
ever written—not Truth and Beauty—but
all my novels are really about confinement and being stuck
with a group of people you don’t know. And the book
I’m writing now: same thing. I just write the same book
over and over and over again. And some day I’m going
to get a letter from Thomas Mann’s estate suing me for
my lame attempts to plagiarize.
The question is: if I can boil it down, what was
the most important part of The Magician’s Assistant
for me, and was it the dreams, and was it that you can only
create a perfect illusion in your sleep?
For me, personally, all of my books have a problem that I
am trying to solve for myself as a writer. That is the thing
that maintains my interest. It is not anything that I expect
any reader to get; it’s just not about that. It’s
just not a test. But that’s a book in which this is
the problem: the main character dies in the first sentence
of the novel. You have two characters, one who has the first
half of the story, one who has the second half of the story;
how can you get the information from one character to the
other character, keeping the main characters as the central
focus of the story with, essentially, not using flashbacks?
(And there are, probably, three or four very short flashbacks
in that book.) But how do you exchange information through
dialogue and setting about a character who isn’t in
the book? So, that was the main thing for me. What’s
really interesting, though, about The Magician’s
Assistant, which is dedicated to Lucy, is if I hadn’t
written that book, that is the book I would have written after
she died.
After Lucy died... I didn’t know Lucy’s family...
The Magician’s Assistant—for the 99% of you
who have not read it—is a book about a magician’s
assistant, a woman’s whose best friend is her gay magician;
she loves him; they marry right before his death; he dies;
he’s always told her that he’s an orphan; and
then, all of a sudden, this family comes from Nebraska who
she’s never heard about before and they exchange the
two parts of the story...The extent to which The Magician’s
Assistant turned out to be my experience in Lucy’s
death was unbelievable: one, in that it was a friendship that
was like a marriage; it was a non-sexual friendship that was
so profound that a lot of people... I got a lot of weird reviews
after she died and people would say, “Well, clearly,
they were repressed lesbians and they just never thought to
go to bed together.” People actually have this limitation
about love and how far love and commitment in friendship can
really go. That’s one thing The Magician’s
Assistant is about. But the other thing is that she inherits
a family that she never knew after her loved one dies; and
I inherited Lucy’s family and I had never met them.
They were completely gone from her life, but they felt really
bad about that after she died. Then, they showed up and lighted
onto me like a plague of locusts. And I didn’t have
an affair with her sister—I’d like to make that
so clear. But it was really creepy; I just kept thinking of:
“Oh, wow, here I am, watching my own novel unfold.”
And I also had the most phenomenal dreams about Lucy, which
I still have. And she’s so, so, so incredibly part of
my life, and part of my subconscious life, and she’s
just there all the time. And so, also, that was a big part
of that book.
It was really funny; that a very sweet book in ways I never
realized. But I go places and people come up to me all the
time and sort of collapse in my arms and say, “This
is the thing that really helped me make sense of my grief.”
And it, oddly, helped me make sense of my own grief. But I
just wrote it before its time, which always happens.
[New question, inaudible.]
I did carry Lucy around a lot and I have a hernia, literally—I
have a hernia that I have not had repaired to prove it. Yeah,
a lot of people did. She weighed 98 pounds, and people say
to me all the time: “Oh, you’re so small.”
I’m actually incredibly strong and I could pick up many
of you. And when she got out of the hospital, especially when
had had a bone taken out of her leg, it wasn’t a Scarlet
O’Hara moment; she couldn’t walk. She
couldn’t walk at all. And in New York it’s really
hard to deal with wheelchairs and all; it’s just easier
to pick her up and carry her. You know, my great line is:
you can always hail a cab with a girl in your arms. So I would
hold her and she would be: “Taxi! taxi!” And we
always got them.
Some of my favorite books and some of my favorite
writers?
I’m a big fan of Elizabeth Dewberry and Robert Olen
Butler. I like to just get that out of the way. I actually
am; I really am.
I gave a reading a couple weeks ago with Jonathan Safran Foer
whose work I admire greatly and somebody asked that question.
He went first and he said, “You can’t answer a
question like that. You know? It changes all the time. It
depends on where you are and every day it changes; it’s
not the same. And different things...and different reasons...and
blah blah blah.” I’m not making fun of him, because
he’s incredibly smart and a great guy. But I was like:
“Oh, I can. I can tell you.”
There are books like The Magic Mountain, and One
Hundred Years of Solitude, and Lolita, Anna
Karenina, that are on everybody’s top list. And
then there are books that just change all the time. I’ve
been on a huge William Maxwell kick. In fact, this is really
funny, this comes back to Lucy: When Lucy died, one of her
friends who went and cleaned out her apartment kept saying,
“What do you want? What do you want?” I don’t
want anything. I don’t want anything. And she had very
little left because she moved many times; she had practically
nothing. But Sophie sent me two books. One was The Last
of the Peshwas and the other one was They Came Like
Swallows. I was so mad at her for sending me the books
and I tucked them in my bookshelf. Probably two years later,
I was going on a flight and I pulled out They Came Like
Swallows and took it with me. That was the first William
Maxwell book that I read. And I think I’ve read all
of them since then. To read They Came Like Swallows
and then to read So Long, See You Tomorrow is one
of the most remarkable experiences. They’re both extremely
short novels and they were written fifty years apart, or fifty-five—he
wrote one in his late twenties and one at 80—and they’re
about the same characters in the same time. So Long, See
You Tomorrow is one of the most perfect, perfect books.
I’m a great admirer of ambition—ambition isn’t
a matter of size, but it is about fully capturing something—and
this book is extraordinary in that way.
I’m on a giant Joan Didion kick. The Year of Magical
Thinking: phenomenal book and also a real answer to Truth
and Beauty because it talks about her year of grief after
her husband dies. That got me to go back to early Joan Didion
which I had read before and loved. So, I re-read Slouching
Toward Bethlehem, The White Album, After
Henry, and one that I hadn’t read before called
Where I Was From. I’m never able to get her
fiction very well but her nonficiton is enormously important
to me.
I just read the new Cormac McCarthy book, and I loved it.
Did anybody read that? Oh, I couldn’t put it down. Unbelievably
violent and disgusting but...Cormac McCarthy who I deeply
love. I think Suttree is one of the great novels
of our time. It’s a really, really, really hard book.
No Country of Old Men is like some sort of torturously
fast, whiplash, amusement park ride and it just really completely
leaves you breathless.
So, these are not, like, my favorite books of the Ages.
Phillip Roth’s The Human Stain: a book I always
really like to recommend.
And those Rabbit Angstrom novels? John Updike? Drop out of
graduate school tomorrow. Everything I ever needed to learn...I
learned more by reading those four books—one, two, three,
four—I learned more about writing than I learned from
anything else in my life. Really a profound experience for
me. Lots of people hate them. You have to read them at the
right time. Sort of like Lolita. You know, it’s
such a wildly offensive book, and if you read it at the wrong
moment in your life you’re only offended by it; if you
read it later or at the right moment of your life and you
can see the structure, and the beauty, and the language it’s:
Ahhh! There’s nothing better than Lolita. And
the same is true with the Rabbit novels. I know people who
are, “Ah, they’re just so misogynistic. How can
you possibly read them?” They are incredibly
misogynistic, but, you know, at some point you say, “Hey,
let’s not; let’s go with it.” There’s
so much to learn. If we ignored all great works of art because
they were misogynisitic, what a lonely little world this would
be.
Question: Why was Iowa so awful?
You want the truth. Iowa was so awful because I went to Catholic
girls school for 12 years then I went to Sarah Lawrence, which,
anyway might as well have been. I went to Iowa and I went
on a bad date, you know, and that was it. It was two years
of a bad date. And that’s not Iowa’s fault, but
that is Iowa’s responsibility. It also is a place, like
I think a lot of graduate programs are, where the faculty
was rotating, and I think that they really lure people in
to teach by saying: “You won’t have to do much
work. We’ll give you a lot of money; you won’t
really have to do anything.” And they really don’t.
Sometimes you get a great faculty person who’s cycling
through for a semester, but a lot of what you get is good
people who are good writers who are really, really lazy. And
they’re only going to be there for a semester, and they
don’t care about you, your work, you getting better,
anything.
I just had a really rotten luck of the draw. It seems perfectly
possible that other people could go there and have a great
luck of draw and get a terrific set of teachers. I didn’t.
I had Angus Wilson about six months before he died. He taught
the class entirely in French. I don’t speak French.
Okay? That was my experience at Iowa. I never realized—I
taught a spin once at the University of California at Irvine—and
I just have always thought writing programs are a crap shoot:
like, who you happen to get as a teacher, who happens to show
up in your class, what that chemistry is, and that’s
going to decide whether or not you’re in a good writing
program or a bad writing program. But when I taught at UC-Irvine,
the program was run by Geoffrey Wolff...(You want to talk
about a brilliant book, guys? Read Duke of Deception.
The whole genre of memoir should have been shut down and thrown
out after Duke of Deception because it is such a
perfectly nailed book. And everybody read Toby Wolff’s
book, This Boy’s Life, which is a very, very
good book, but a pale shadow next to Duke of Deception.)...Geoffrey
ran the program and he picked every student and he picked
every teacher; he oversaw it. It was a program that ran with
such grace and goodwill, and structure, and fairness—I
really realized, in fact, that the person at the top who’s
calling the shots sets the tone for the program. I was in
the program at Iowa in the last two years of Jack Leggett’s
administration. I loved Jack...loved him. Housesat for him
every time he went away. He had a terrible crush on my mother.
But Jack had been doing it for a long time and he was sick
and tired of it. And he never showed up and he let the department
secretary run it, and she didn’t do a great job. See?
So, it’s not Iowa. It’s not that program; it’s
not anything. Then Frank Conroy had it all these years. Now
Frank’s dead. Now there’s somebody else; Samantha
Chang’s in there now and it could be fabulous. It’s
just turnover. The only trick about Iowa is getting in; then
you own that name and that’s it. It never means anything
while you’re there.
Don’t you feel lucky about the choices you made?
Question: It’s so much easier for me to write
fiction rather than nonficiton, so what kind of shifts do
I have to make to write fiction?
You know, the kind of shifts where you disconnect your phone,
and you stop reading, and you stop hanging out with your family.
It’s about isolation. It’s about boredom, for
me. I could write a piece of nonfiction—a really good
piece of nonfiction—like, while I was jogging. Dorothy
Allison who wrote Bastard Out of Carolina is a friend
of mine and I remember once we were having coffee and she
was talking about “necessary boredom,” that she
had to carve out real, true boredom for herself or she couldn’t
get to that place where fiction was, where you want to hear
a story so desperately that you were willing to tell it to
yourself, that you cut yourself so far off from story—which
is life, which is conversation which is love—you want
that so badly that you have to go create it for yourself.
And that is a real carved out place for me. I went to New
York eight or nine days ago to give a talk and then here,
and you would really think I would have gotten something done
in those days I was home in between. And I didn’t, I
just couldn’t quiet down. I just knew I was leaving
again. I was stupid; I’m such an orchid. Although I’m
pretty productive too, you know?
But how do you quiet everything down? That’s fiction.
That is not nonfiction. For me. Because I’m not a great
nonfiction writer. I’m not a great fiction writer. But,
you know? I’m a better fiction writer. I always say
to my husband, “We could be billionaires if I was an
ad man. I would be the best ad man in the history of the planet.”
I could write jingles that would sell Tide like you couldn’t
believe. I could write bad TV shows. I could write...It kind
of goes back to Tara Lipinski and the figure eights. I could
write trash that would really, really make us a bloody fortune.
But...I’m really doing something that I love and I value,
and I’ve never known an ad man, or a TV writer, or any
of those people who didn’t take me aside and say, “What
I really want”—in their house in Carmel, you know?—“what
I really, really want is what you have.” I have the
best job in the world.
I wish I was better at it. I guess if you didn’t always
wish you were better at it you wouldn’t keep doing it.
But that’s the carving sadness in my soul. I always
wish I was smarter, and I wish I was better.
[Audience member: But you are good]. Yeah, yeah, isn’t
that the setup?
But, see? That’s what fiction is. [But when] I write
nonfiction: nobody can touch me. I mean, I can turn out a
piece for the New York Times in, like, two hours.
And nobody can touch me. But in fiction? I’m always
reaching up for something I can’t get. So, isn’t
it sick that that’s what I do.
