Interview with Ann Patchett on 'State of Wonder'

and today I am with Ann Patchett who we are so excited is in our office and lives in Nashville and is a personal favorite of many of our staff and I know many book page readers and today we're talking about state of wonder which is her new novel comes out in June so thank you and for talking to book page or come into the office really super easy a powerhouse well first of all would you mind just kind of giving a basic plot description you know what's the book about for our readers who and they haven't because it's not that yeah it's the story of Marina Singh who is a doctor and a pharmacologist doing research in Minnesota and at the beginning of the book she finds out that her friend an office mate Anders Ekman has gone to South America and is dead and he's gone down to South America to check on the research of dr. anacs Swenson who's developing a new drug and then it's now her job to go both find out what happened to Anders and also to find out how the drug is developing dr. Swanson's trying to develop a drug that would ensure everlasting fertility to women she's found a tribe of women in the Amazon that can have children forever mm-hmm Mirena doesn't really want to go to the Amazon because as it turns out dr. Swanson was her teacher in medical school and they have a very fraught personal history but she goes and that's where the story began is there a lot of bugs while snakes poison arrows cannibals and it really starts with the bang you know from but there's this death pretty much yeah I like the book that starts with the bed oh yeah that's important to me well I know that you did go to the Amazon to do research I think you went to Peru yes so would you mind telling me a little bit about that journey why you went to Peru and important for you on them oh you want a guided tour I mean this has a really wild place addictive in the book like these have bugs and snakes and you know having to take malaria pills which is kind of a part of the plot the side effects of that right oh did you have any of the same experiences that marina had well first I shouldn't say I went to Peru the book is set in Brazil and set in the Brazilian Amazon and I wanted to get a certain kind of boat tour of the Amazon and in Brazil I could only find boats that were like ocean liners huge or I could find rafts with cockroaches and I couldn't find anything in between so I found a boat in Peru that worked out very well and I figured I would be Amazonas the Amazon which i think is true and I went for Gourmet magazine there because back in the days of Gourmet magazine whenever I needed to do research for a book I could call them up and say I need to go to Brazil they were really generous yeah I really missed them so I went on a boat for half the trip and that was fantastic it was a gorgeous boat which was later taken over by pirates and set on fire about two weeks after we were on their boat so I was super glad to have missed that and then afterwards I went to a jungle Lodge and I stayed too long and I really went a little crazy you can't go anywhere in the Amazon by yourself you can't take the smallest walk unless you have a guide with you there are so many things that will kill you and eat you and really like little frogs they wouldn't eat you but they would kill you the size of your thumbnail and they'd have enough poison and their skin to take down amen yeah for you what was read by anything while you were there I mean what was the truth well there was actually a point and this became a scene in the book where one of the people that we were with on open boat we just went out and we would take these day excursions and little open boats and one of the guys who was just a guest on the trip pulled a giant anaconda into the boat just recreationally and it was never like longer than this came in you know there lady he was about 15 feet and about that big around it was a really significant an animal and it turns out I didn't know this at the time that the man Greg Greer who later became a great friend of mine was a professional snake handler and a herpetologist and he went all over the world studying snakes and taking people on tours where he would identify the snakes in the first but it was very startling you would have been startling if one of the guys had picked up the snake but it was a guest and he saw none of us thought he just charted his hand into the water and pulled this giant snake into the boat but was like ten or twelve feet long there's just there not a lot of places you know it was a little and that there is a scene that yes that experience perhaps not with the right Pleasant writing maybe to mistake did wrap around Greg very fast and that seemed a significant problem to me and he was answering questions while wrestling with this name but when I was about halfway through with the book I was in New York and I was having lunch with some friends and I I was telling them this story of Greg and the snake and the trip and they were so dumbstruck hey when I was telling it I realized it was such a good story and that's when I went back and put it in the farm well were you surprised by anything that you found in the jungle of you or was surprised by everything okay there's nobody there I'm sure that there are people too there but you just don't run into them you go for hours and hours and hours and you don't see anybody and it's not like it's one river they're just splitting tributaries everywhere so we would take these little boats every day and go up these tributaries for hours and hours and hours and I just start thinking oh my god after God has a heart attack you're on you're never getting back that quality of the air was astonishing they call it the lung of the world and it really is true it's just where the oxygen is being manufactured and the things that grow and crawl and fly and hit you in the face you can't imagine it's like if we were sitting this close together and I took a handful of unpopped popcorn and threw it in your face as far as I could every 30 seconds that's what the bugs were like well well this is a would normally be kind of a funny question to ask but it does factor into the book it's whether you took lyrium this malaria tunnel which has these very extreme side effects can cause you to have terrible nightmares or suicidal thoughts I did take Larry and I didn't have terrible nightmares or suicidal thoughts however it was very rare reaction delirium which was the whole inside of my mouth and my throat burned off their hope my Tom everything inside my mouth blistered and I got healed and fell off and you know that feeling if you eat something too hot have a soup that's too hot and you burn off the top of your tongue and nothing is right for a couple of days it's not particularly painful this is just everything is all it was that way the amount of time I was tiring and when I came back and I told the doctor who had prescribed it to me what had happened she said don't ever she said the next time it will be much worse I don't know what that means that my tongue will fall off well I hope you're talking about the Amazon but listen get into the book okay so the really the primary relationship I would say in the book is between marina the pharmacologist the doctor who goes to the Amazon and the doctor Swenson who is this woman who's in her 70s who was her former teacher she's kind of running the show down there and no mine at the big pharmaceutical company where they work really knows exactly what's going on down there correct yes total freedom and I know that and I've read in a prior interview that you were interested in exploring this teacher-student relationship so I was wondering if you could you know what is about what is it about that relationship that is interesting to you and what teachers have you had in the power students that you know perhaps inspired this you know it is something I do have a strong connection to and that made this book easier to write and the whole thing for me I never had a teacher like dr. Swanson I never had someone who was proof imperious and mean who I was afraid of but I have had some profound relationships with teachers in my life and I really shaped my life after these people I mean there there are people that I loved and I thought the world of and I admired and I wanted to impress and I really thought I just want to be exactly like them and of course I knew everything about them or everything that was accessible to me to know and they didn't know anything about me and it's really interesting to run into these people as adults and you think I tried so hard to be just like you there are so many ways and in which what I'm doing now at this point in my life there's still things that I'm doing in hopes of pleasing you and you have any I actually was at a Writers Conference yesterday in Chattanooga and saw my old teacher and my very very favorite teacher in my life Allen Kerr gannis who I haven't seen for years and I kept thinking about it because Allen and I run into each other maybe every three years or so at something like that and we see each other for a half an hour and it's lovely and he's so nice to me if I keep thinking you have no idea how much I love you no idea how central you are to every piece of how my life turned out he's like oh it's so good to see you it's a little bit like having a crush on a rock star when your kid do it's so defining for a while but then you run into that rock star again every now and I don't know if I had students who had that relationship to me or not because that's the thing if you're into mature you don't know well dr. Swenson that the teacher in the book is a very interesting character and I'm wondering first of all there are a lot of medical ethics issues in this book um the doctors from this american pharmaceutical company are performing studies in the amazon on these negatives who maybe don't exactly know what's there but they're being exposed to malaria and they don't know they're sort of some tusky it comes as an exploitation accuses him of Tuskegee right and so I wonder a couple questions one if you have a viewer just have had a long interest in medical six and that was something that you were specifically wanting to explore and to if you think that dr. Swenson is a you know a heroic good character if she's doing the right thing well my husband is a doctor and my stepfather when I was growing up was a doctor my mother was a nurse my stepdaughters in theirs I certainly have spent my life around medical people I have a lot of very close friends who are doctors so this is something that I do think about a lot and it's a balance there's there isn't a right answer or wrong answer you don't want to exploit people and at the same time you want medicine to be able to progress and there has to be some line in between those things do I think dr. Swanson is a good character no do I think she is a bad character absolutely not you know she I want her to be something that's going to make people think mmm and sit down and wrestle with those issues and have discussions about about ethics and about being powerful and the idea of how much you could really get done if you freed yourself from insurance and medical ethics and all of these things one of the things that actually really got me started on the plot for this book was Bill Frist who used to be the Senate Majority Leader would go down to Africa and operate on gorillas because he was a heart transplant surgeon and apparently gorillas hearts and human rights are very similar and there were a lot of sick gorillas who needed operations and he would also operate on them in the Washington zoo and in Africa and while he was in Africa every now and then something would happen who a kid would come in with an arrow through the head whatever and there was nobody else around well that's not his area of medical expertise but at that moment if it's you or nothing I mean frankly if it's me or nothing you're gonna try the bigger what you do and that really kind of got me thinking both what would a person be capable under if they were three of all the rules I like rules I'm a real rural person but it's it's worth in Marina the student who's really the main character she there is some of that with her too she had been originally she went to medical school to be in ob/gyn and because of something happens and she ends up changing her path and becomes a pharmacologist and then when she's in the jungle she's in that position and then it is there are these scenes where you know don't you follow don't be don't use all the latex gloves that's who may be their standards are relaxed and when it pushes her when we were in the Amazon I actually met a doctor who was an American who had gone down to the Amazon 15 years before on vacation and she just said this is it I'm staying forever and she you know had a clinic and things like that and she was like oh do you think we forgot sir why do you think that we throw those needles away we wash them and reuse them we do everything again again and she said it was the same thing in the hospital it's funny when you go on a research trip like that it's the things you don't expect to find out and you just meet a doctor in a cafe and all of a sudden you're top about the students see they've got lots I never would have thought before and she was saying why didn't you bring miss things you know why didn't you bring us antibiotics why didn't you bring us IV bags and we were like you're going on vacation we had no idea yeah well um in the come in the publicity materials for the book it said that puts this heart of darkness comparison in your mind you know even before I read the book I I knew that it was sort of like heart of darkness journey and it really does throw this story in terms of the journey into the jungle and the leptin levels of darkness when she's there and I was wondering what your history with the the classic is they were you know I already been high school and was having to do something refreshing with my head and it's are you at home at the end or I'm a current and I think that very loudly I'm not a Conrad buff I didn't at all set out to write a heart of darkness and in fact I was starting out thinking about the ambassador's the Henry James novel where the character is set to Paris to bring back the son who has gone astray and I think it's a pretty classic theme character egg is sent in to find Karen Rooney who's gone missing and that was the thematically what I was thinking about but I have to say when I got halfway through the book I thought oh this is going much towards heart of darkness and it was just that dr. Swanson had so much power although frankly Chad Newsome in the ambassador's has an enormous amount of power although it's Anna social kind the power of youth well can you tell us anything about your next project or are you are you working on anything now or no you know I'm not and I don't ever start a new book before the other has launched because the idea of being 50 pages into a novel and going on a book tour just makes me want to weep I'm rewriting a lot of essays lately and I'm trying to decide whether or not to do a collection of essays because I've been writing them for 20 years and I have it turns out a lot of them so I haven't quite made my mind up about a book but I've been working on that and I have an idea for a novel that it's really you could put the whole thing in a walnut shower yes or no answer well would you would you compares how would you play the state of wonder with your other books I know that our readers and I'm sure most readers that you run into or just very passionate about belcanto and feel such you know that book is so special to a lot of people and I know when we first blogged about state of wonder we we brought something like this like there might be some similarities here with the international characters and I don't know would you would you compare this and you know stop well I guess and hi and plot and how you feel about it with any of your other books well it's a couple different questions one I think that people tend and a reader told me this once and it made great sense to me that they tend to like the book that they read first or the best of yours and so I think that I got so many readers with bel canto and there were people who were passionate bel canto people but I met this woman once and the first book of mine she'd ever read was run and she said I went back and I read all of your other books but I'll always love her on the bass because that was how I I find if I meet readers who have read all of my books the one that they like the best is almost always magician's assistant so it's just really hard to say and when I was setting this book in the Amazon I had this moment that I thought South America shouldn't do that you know I've already done South America and then I thought oh it's a continent I can write two books there because I needed someplace that had great potential for medical exploration and malaria so while Africa or Indonesia might have been better for malaria they wouldn't have been as good for medical exploration so that's how I wound up back in South America and I think that actually there's a way in which structurally this book is more like magician's assistant than any of the other books because it's a limited third-person narrator and marina Singh is similar to Sabine who was the heroine of magician's assistant in that the whole book is told from her point of view mm-hmm well we all like that I like to ask although she came in and we saw this a little bit before but just what you're reading recently and what you're recommending oh okay well I've been reading a lot of galius lately so it depends on when this will air as well that people will actually be looking at these books that I've read three great galleys the the best my very favorite is called the family Fang by Kevin Wilson and that will be out in August it's a phenomenal funny strange book about parents who are performance artists who have two small children and they make the children participate in their performance pieces which are just about crowd disruption and that's how they have this bizarre family life that sort of gives you an insight into how is our family life movie just read another gallery called song of Achilles by Madeline Miller which is a retelling of the Iliad and beautifully done and I actually ordered up a copy of the Iliad which I haven't read since college thinking okay I'm ready to do this again that was it was so different it was really exciting to read another book it was terrific I really really enjoyed that now that said what I'm actually reading right now and reading our mutual friend by charles dickens which is 900 pages and i'm going to be reading it for a really long time and it's so good so exciting to me a great big inside well I assume you're gonna be gearing up to go on tour here in a month I'm gonna yeah so what is your is this something that you enjoy talking to readers what is your favorite thing about that experience it's really cool I mean I know I I don't love it and it tell us and this one is incredible I'm gonna be in the UK Wow I'm being during the arrest for a month without coming home a month City a night and then I'm home for six weeks eight weeks and then I do it all over again in Australia so it's just so exhausting and their part in the stores meeting people it's a tiny part of it and then the larger part really is the travel in the hotel and they're trying to find something to eat and just kind of keeping yourself together I'm exercising a lot right now I really feel like I'm in training I mean I feel like I'm trying to get a lot of sleep see a lot of friends really be in touch with people go running just kind of on every level in my life be strong but it's amazing that by day three it's all gone so mostly what I'm thinking about right now is packing and determined what you could bear you know getting it in a little tiny suitcase so you don't have to check the bag exactly and where I know people what cities I can go to where I have a friend that I can do laundry at their house as I really hate hotel long yeah because they bleach your clothes well and finally this is sort of off topic but this is library week this week and book page we are distributing public libraries and huge library supporters we're going to LA this summer and I would always like to talk to authors about libraries and I know that you in particular are a great supporter of the Nashville Public Library and so if you wouldn't mind just kind of giving them an elevator pitch or why basically why do you love libraries and why do you think why you think they're important particularly in the midst of funding cuts and yes because I read things all the time that say our libraries are becoming irrelevant as everything is going digital and it's really not true i mean i think that the libraries are the sort of social REDCROSS apart it's they are our community centers and it's a place for little kids to go and teams to go after school and people who are retired or people who don't have jobs there are people who need resource material it's more than just where you go to check out books it's the center of our community and I also think that libraries are the very best example of our government because you can go to the radiused little tiny branch of a rural Public Library and you can order up any book that's in the Widener Library at Harvard through interlibrary loan the great point really is about a quality of information and it's it's a beautiful example of sort of how we look after one another through the library so I'm very passionately supportive and I love libraries as buildings anytime I go to a city I always go to visit the library and I love to see the different libraries and what people are doing the library in Salt Lake City believable really and also of course the library in Seattle which is now the number-one tourist attraction in Seattle more people go to visit the library as tourists than go to see the space there you go a lottery fun fact for you well I know you're speaking at the National Public Library the summer during their meeting in June at the end of June I believe yeah we will I'm sure be there then - told you I got the book all right thank you so much for speaking with me today about state of wonder and pick it up in June readers you can try it thank you so much

Channel: BookPage

Views: 14,717

Rating: 4.625 out of 5

Keywords: Ann, Patchett, on, 'State, of, Wonder', literary, fiction, bestsellers, authors, interview

Id: o15fIscrIro

Length: 26min 53sec (1613 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 18 2011