Salon@615-Ann Patchett

I'm so glad to be here this is my dream to go to an event that I could walk to so I just my husband and I and my dog Sparky who is working the room it just walked over here and I'm so appreciative to MBA for hosting us tonight and this is you know this is sort of a strange moment because tomorrow morning at 8 o'clock I have a signing event at Hudson booksellers in the Nashville Airport and it goes from there and I will be on the road for the next six weeks and if you go to Ann Patchett calm you can find out where I will be so if you have relatives that you could send to come and see me that would be really great I'm always just terrified when I go out on book tour and people always think that that's because that I'm afraid that I'm gonna get bad reviews or I'm afraid that nobody's going to come to the event so when I say to people I'm terrified they comfort me and they say you know Kay no no the book is good people are really gonna like it that actually isn't what I'm terrified of and I'm not afraid of public speaking I just can't stand the idea of leaving home for six weeks and being on an airplane every single day and sleeping in a hotel every night because they put so much bleach in the sheets and the towels which you just don't notice if you're in a hotel for two or three or four nights but try it at some time for six weeks I think your your skin actually starts to fall off so this is really like my bon voyage and I feel like I'm going off to China on a small raft and I'm really really happy that I get to see so many of my friends and my neighbors and my family before I go Parnassus books closed early today so everybody could come and I can't tell you what an enormous source of joy and love that store has been in my life and how much I care for everyone who works there and everyone who comes in and shops there so I thank all of you for supporting this crazy dream that Karen Hayes and I cooked up about five years ago and one of the things that I always do when I'm on book tour see this is like I'm trying all of this stuff out on you guys tonight if the reading bombs tomorrow night in Brooklyn I'll just read something else but every time I go on book tour now I sell a book so it's like my David Sedaris thing so the book that I am selling this year is dogs as I see them and it's a book that was written or I should say drawn by Lucy Dawson in England in the late 1930s and it's been out of print since the 50s and I know this fantastic editor at HarperCollins named Liz Sullivan who's been trying to get this thing put back into print for seven years and nobody was interested in doing it and so she asked me if I would write the introduction and then they put it back into print and there's a companion book that's coming out in a few months called dogs rough and smooth and Susan Orlean who wrote the orchid thief did the intro for that Greek Christmas present great housewarming gift I always like to encourage people maybe to think about not drinking quite so much so the next time you go to a dinner party instead of taking a bottle of wine you could take some what a nice copy of dogs as I see them and we have them here tonight and we have them at Parnassus but be sure to pick it up and flip through it because everyone who has a dog or loves a dog would love this book it's really an amazing book what this woman did for a living is had dogs come to her house and then sat for little dog portraits and she you know like did the Queen's corgis and that kind of thing okay so Commonwealth let's see seventeen years ago eighteen years ago I was living at the Hellena Court Apartments on Belle Meade Boulevard because it was the only rental property that I could find where I met my friend Donna nicely we were across the hall neighbors it was the only apartment that I could find that took dogs and when I was at the Hellena court apartment there was a woman I loved very much who lived downstairs whose name was Jean Pierre and Jean Pierre said to one of the other women who lived in this building because it was only women I think there was like a rule or something we were we were like a aging sorority house and Jean Pierre who was in her 80s at the time said to someone else about my first book patron saint of liars which she read when I moved in if you ask me that girl seems to know a little bit too much about homes for unwed mothers and it was a it was a real wake-up moment because my goal as a novelist has always been to write books that will not in any way disturb my family I really wanted to write fiction for a whole host of reasons where you could read my book and at the end you wouldn't know anything more about anyone else in my life and in fact I knew lots of people who wrote what we call Romana clefts the thinly veiled autobiographical novel and I really looked down on them I mean and I kept it inside it was private but I really thought that the honorable thing to do was to write fiction from a place of great imagination and not tap your own life experiences but this is what happened to me in my life and this is my seventh novel and my tenth book I really think I'm writing different books and people are always saying to me oh you write such it's like your books have been written by different people they're so different but in fact they are exactly the same book over and over again a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society it is the Magic Mountain it is Lord of the Flies it the Poseidon Adventure three things that had a big influence on my life and I never am trying to do this and in fact I'm trying very hard not to do this but whenever I finish a book and get to the end if it's state of wonder and our heroine has landed in the Amazon in a tribe she doesn't understand if it's belcanto you know a group of people who have come to a party are taken over by hostages and it's always two very disparate groups of people who are stuck together in some isolated place for a long period of time even in magician's assistant it's the sort of glamorous girl from LA stuck with the people in Nebraska in a snowstorm so what to do what to do I think that I'm probably going to have to write this book for the rest of my life well then I wrote a book called this is the story of a happy marriage thanks to Nicki Kaufman where is Nicki are you still here she's back there oh okay so when Nicki first moved back to Nashville she worked for a couple of weeks as my assistant and what she accomplished in that time was she made the decision that I was going to write a book of essays and she went through all of my essays and she told me what essays were missing and what I still needed to write and she asked me to write a piece a long piece about my marriage she said something that was very kind and now completely outdated she said you're the only you and Carl are the only really happily married couple that I know and now of course she is part of a happily married couple herself because she's all grown up and she said I want you to write an instructive essay to tell me how I can have a happy marriage and what I realized when I started to write that essay was that it was the history the long and extensive history of divorce in my family and that was how I got to my own happy marriage and when I was writing that essay it was the most terrifying thing I had ever written in my life because I felt like I was breaking the sacred trust and I was writing about something very very personal in my family and if for anyone in here who is interested in writing this is actually a really important piece of advice which was at every moment when I was writing that essay and feeling really sick and terrified about it I just kept saying to myself just keep writing it you were the only person in the world who has to read this essay write it finish it put it aside and then make a decision about what you want to do with it and so I did that and when I finished I thought it was a huge betrayal of my family and my history and everyone I loved and that everyone would hate me and I showed it to the principal people in my life and everybody said seriously that was that's the best you got that's what like that's what you think is gonna rock our world and it was a real epiphany that I could in fact write about my family and no one in my family actually cared and and more importantly that the people in my family were really happy for me and they were really supportive of me a whole bunch of other things came into play after that that figured into my ultimately writing Commonwealth one was I read the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward st. Albans which I highly recommend and I knew them to be very autobiographical II grounded fiction and I knew I didn't care at all what had happened in this man's life I only cared about what brilliant books these were another thing that happened I read an essay in a Jonathan Franzen book of essays called farther away and it was about the fact that every time an author writes a book he or she has to do the thing that is the most frightening to them and he said the most frightening thing I could possibly think about would be to write about my family and I thought you know all my life I've been congratulating myself because I've been writing about Peru and and in fact he was right it did seem so much scarier to write something that was not about my family but was set closer to home and that everybody would sort of look at me askance the third thing that happened was I turned 50 and a Barbara Kingsolver had told me when I was 48 was right before I started this book she said you know once you turn 50 you don't care anymore you absolutely don't care what anybody thinks about what you're doing show of hands has anybody else found this to be true I mean it's it's really like I drank the kool-aid or something I have been walking around all this time going I just don't want to upset you I don't want to hurt your feelings I don't want to bother you I don't want to take up too much space and then I woke up on my 50th birthday I was like yeah whatever so it's very important to me at this point in my life to be able to claim the entire the entire landscape of my life even the parts that overlap with the lives of people that I love that I can feel that I can go anywhere and it's so interesting so interesting because I've always believed that as a fiction writer I have always believed that I am entitled to write about people of other races other religions other genders other nationalities what I can go anywhere no one is allowed to say to me that my imagination is there's a limit you know that there's a fence and I'm not allowed to go here you are allowed to say I did a bad job you are allowed to be offended by it but nobody is allowed to tell anyone where their imagination may or may not go and yet that is exactly what I've been doing with myself my whole life I've been saying my imagined can't go here in this place that is in fact closest to me and of course the funny thing is this is exactly the same book that I'm always writing except in the past I spent a whole lot of energy making extravagant paper mache costumes for my characters so nobody would read bel canto and think that it was a book about my childhood and that to stop doing that and just to say instead of like I have a certain amount of energy for a book right and instead of using that energy or some of that energy on costuming and scenery I'm going to put all of the energy into the story and just tell the story I talked to my family about this while I was working on the book I mean that said it's actually not so autobiographical but I talked to my family while I was working on it when I finished it I went to Kinko's I made everybody a copy I sent it out to everybody and it was really funny cuz the first thing I do when I finish a book is I read it out loud to Jane Hamilton and she reads her books out loud to me and she had just written one of my favorite books all year and certainly my favorite book of Jane Hamilton's it's called the excellent lombards and it is her very autobiographical novel which she had been trying to write for 20 years we call it the farm novel but she had not told anyone in her family including her children that she was doing this and so the book was it was published and Jane was you know in the bathroom throwing up because she realized that she neglected to tell anybody in her family that she had written a book about them so when I finished reading Commonwealth out loud to her she said what are you gonna do with your family and I said well I've sent them all copies and she said why why why on what possible planet would you think that that was a good idea and yet it really it really has been a good idea and I read the third pass pages of this book because when you finish a book they make you read it until you loathe it in you despise that in the deepest center of yourself and Carl and I were on a ship in Norway when I was reading at the third time and I could read about two pages at a time and then fall asleep but by the time I got that far in the reading what I realized is it wasn't about us and it was really great my mom is rereading it right now and she said to me this morning I'm halfway through the book it isn't about us I thought it seemed like it was about us the last time so there it is I don't know if that's um like the lady doth protest too much or just interesting pad or a reading so I'm gonna read just the very beginning of the book and that way I don't have to set it up at all the christening party took a turn when Albert cousins arrived with gin fix was smiling when he opened the door and he kept smiling as he struggled to make the connection it was Albert cousins from the district attorney's office standing on the cement slab of his front porch he'd opened the door 20 times in the last half hour to neighbors and friends and people from church and Beverly's sister and all of his brothers and their parents and practically an entire precinct worth of cops but cousins was the only surprise Fixit asked his wife two weeks ago why she thought they had to invite every single person they knew in the world to a christening party and she'd handed over the guest list and asked him who he thought they should cut he hadn't had an answer at the time but if she was standing at the door now he would have pointed straight ahead and said him not that he disliked Albert Cousins he didn't know him other than to be able to put his name together with his face but not knowing him was the reason to not invite him Fix thought that maybe cousins had come to the house to talk about a case nothing like that had ever happened before but what else could be the explanation guests were milling around in the front yard and whether they were coming late or leaving early or just taking refuge outside because the house was packed beyond what any fire marshal would allow fix couldn't say what he was sure of was that cousins was there uninvited alone with a bottle in a bag fix Albert cousin said the tall deputy da in a suit and tie put out his hand ow Vic said did people call him al glad you made it he gave his hand too hard pumps and let it go I'm cutting it close our cousin said looking at the crowd inside as if there might not be room for him the party was clearly past its midpoint most of the small triangular sandwiches were gone half of the cookies the tablecloth beneath the punchbowl was pink and damp fixed stepped aside to let him in you're here now he said wouldn't have missed it though I mean of course he had missed it he hadn't been at the christening dick Spencer was the only one from the DA's office fix had invited dick had been a cop himself he had gone to law school at night pulled himself up without ever making any of the other guys feel like he was better for it it didn't matter that dick was blood driving a black and white or standing in front of a judge there was no doubt where he came from cousins on the other hand was a lawyer like all the others DA's PD's hired guns friendly enough when they needed something but unlikely to invite an officer along for a drink and if they did it was only because the cop was holding out on them and the DA's were the guys who smoked your cigarettes because they were trying to quit the cops who filled up the living room in the dining room and spilled out into the backyard beneath the clothesline and the two orange trees they weren't trying to quit they drank iced tea mixed with lemonade and smoked like stevedores albert cousins handed over the bag and fixed looked inside it was a bottle of gin a big one other people had brought prayer cards and mother-of-pearl rosary beads or a pocket-sized Bible covered in white kid with gilt-edged pages five of the guys or five of their wives had kicked in together and bought a blue enameled cross on a chain with a tiny little pearl in the center very pretty something for later on so this makes a boy and a girl two girls cousins shrugged what can you do not a thing fix said and close the door Beverly had told him to leave it open so that they could get some air which just went to show how much she knew about man's inhumanity to man it didn't matter how many people were in your house you did not leave the goddamn front door open Beverly leaned out of the kitchen they were easily thirty people standing between them the entire Malloy clan all the DiMaggio's a handful of altar boys plowing through what was left of the cookies but there was no missing Beverly that yellow dress fix she said raising her voice over the din and it was cousins who turned his head first and cousins gave her a nod by reflex fix stood straighter but he let the moment pass make yourself at home he said to the duty district attorney and pointed out a cluster of detectives by the sliding glass door their jackets still on you know plenty of people here maybe that was true maybe it wasn't he sure as hell didn't know the host fix turned to cut his way through the crowd and the crowd parted for him touching his shoulder shaking his hand saying congratulations he tried not to step on any of his the kids his four-year-old daughter Caroline them they were playing some sort of game on the dining room floor crouching and crawling like tigers between the feet of adults the kitchen was packed with wives all of them laughing and talking too loud none of them being helpful except for Lois from next door who was pulling bowls out of the refrigerator Beverly's best friend Wallace was using the side of the bright chrome toaster to reapply her lipstick Wallace was too thin and too tan and when she straightened up she had too much lipstick on Beverly's mother was sitting at the breakfast table with the baby in her lap she had changed her from the lacy white christening gown into the starched white dress with yellow flowers embroidered around the neck as if she were a bride who had slipped away into her going-away dress at the end of the reception the women at the kitchen took turns making a fuss over the baby acting like it was their job to keep her entertained until the magi arrived but the baby wasn't entertained her blue eyes were glazed over she was staring into the middle distance tired of everything all this rush to make sandwiches and take in presents for a girl who was not yet a year old look how pretty she is the mother-in-law said to no one running the back of one finger across the babies rounded cheek ice Beverly said to her husband we're out of ice that was your sister's assignment Vick said then she failed can you go ask one of the guys to go get some it's hot and it's too hot to have a party without ice she had tied an apron behind her neck but not around her waist she was trying not to wrinkle her dress strands of yellow hair had come loose from her French twist and we're falling into her eyes if she didn't bring the ice then she might as well come in here and help you make sandwiches fix was looking right at Wallace when he said this but Wallace capped her lipstick and ignored him he admitted to be helpful because clearly Beverly had her hands full to look at her anyone would think that she was the sort of person who would have her parties catered someone who would sit on the couch while other people passed the trays Bonnie's so happy to see all these cops in one room she can't be expected to think about sandwiches beverly said and then she stopped the assemblage of cream cheese and cucumbers for a moment and looked down at his hand what's in the bag Fix smiled and held up the gin and his wife surprised delivered the very first smile she had given him all day maybe all week whoever you send to the store Wallace said displaying a sudden interest in the conversation tell them to get the tonic I'm not finished yet but I just want to point this next sentence out because it is my favorite sentence in the book you ready fix said he would buy the ice himself okay only four if you got it there was a lauren bard well you got it okay there was a market up the street and he wasn't opposed to slipping out for a minute the relative quiet of the neighborhood the order of the bungalows with their tight green lawns the slender shadows palm trees caste and the smell of the orange blossoms all combined with the cigarette he was smoking to have a settling effect on him his brother Tom came along and they walked together in companionable silence Tom and Betty had three kids now all girls and they lived in Escondido where he worked for the fire department fix was starting to see that this is the way life worked once you got older and the kids came there wasn't as much time as you thought there was going to be the brothers hadn't seen each other since they all met up at their parents house and gone to mass on Christmas Eve and before that it was probably when they'd driven down to Escondido for Aaron's christening a red Sunbeam convertible went by and Tom said that one and fixed nodded sorry he hadn't seen it first now he had to wait for something he wanted to come along at the market they bought four bags of ice and four bottles of tonic the kid at the register asked if they needed any limes and fix shook his head it was Los Angeles in June you couldn't give a lime away fix hadn't checked his watch when they left for the market but he was a good judge of time most cops are they've been gone 20 minutes 25 tops it wasn't long enough for everything to change but when they came back the front door was standing open and there was no one left in the yard Tom didn't notice the difference but then a fireman wouldn't if the place didn't smell like smoke he went right in there was still plenty of people in the house but it was quieter now fix it turned on the radio before the party started and for the first time he could hear a few notes of music the kids weren't crawling in the dining room anymore and no one seemed to notice they were gone all the attention was focused on the open kitchen door which was where the two Keating brothers were headed with the ice fixes partner Lomer was waiting for them and Lomer cut his eyes in the direction of the crowd you got here just in time he said as tight as it had been in the kitchen before they left there were three times as many people crammed in there now and most of them were men Beverly's mother was nowhere in sight and neither was the baby Beverly was standing at the sink a butcher knife in her hand she was slicing oranges from an enormous pile that was sliding across the counter while two lawyers from the LA County District Attorney's Office dick Spencer and Albert cousins were twisting the halves of oranges on to metal juicers their foreheads were flushed and damp with sweat they're open collars were just beginning to darken they worked as if the safety of their City relied on the making of orange juice Beverly's sister Bonnie ready now to be helpful pluck dick Spencer's glasses from his face and wiped them with a dish towel even though dick had a capable wife somewhere in the crush that was when dick his eyes relieved from the scrim of sweat soft fix and Tom and called out for ice ice Bonnie cried because it was true it was hot as hell and I sounded better than anything she dropped her towel to lift two bags from Tom placing them in the sink atop the neat orange cups of empty rinds then she took the bags from fix ice was her responsibility beverly stopped slicing perfect timing she said and dug a paper cup into the open plastic bag knocking out three modest cubes as if she knew to pace herself it was a short drink half gin half orange juice from a full pitcher she made another and another and another as the cups were passed through the kitchen and out door and into the waiting hands of the guests I got tonic thick said looking at the one bag still in his hands he wasn't objecting to anything other than the feeling that he and his brother had somehow been left behind in the time that had taken them to walk to the market and back orange juice is better albert cousin said stopping just long enough to down the drink that Bonnie had made for him Bonnie so recently enamored of cops had shifted her allegiance to the two district attorneys for vodka fix said screwdrivers everybody knew that but cousins tilted his head toward the disbeliever and there was Beverly handing her husband a drink for all the world it seemed like she and cousins had a code worked out between them fix held the cup in his hand and stared at the uninvited guests he had three brothers in the house an unknown number of able-bodied men from the Los Angeles Police Department a priest who organized to Saturday boxing leagues for troubled boys all of whom would back him up in the removal of a single Deputy District Attorney Cheers Beverley said in a low voice not as a toast but as a directive and fix still thinking there was a complaint to be made turned up his paper cup you have to clap again at the end so I always like people to pace themselves are there any questions about me my family my bookstore about what you should be reading you really have to come to see Colson whitehead especially I love that book so passionately and I'm so excited about all of the good things that have happened to it but also immortals is coming a gentleman in Moscow which is terrific Jonathan Safran Foer which I haven't read yet but it's very big and I've loved his other books which were smaller or I can just tell you what to read or we can go home you know or tell us what to read we'll read those you know read Dickens read David Copperfield if you haven't read it yet this has been an amazing year I have to say last year was a little lame especially for fiction and it's funny because as a bookseller I'm very aware of that you know what's the big book this year started off the first week of January with two of my favorite books that were published this year my name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth trout which I adored and also when breath becomes air by Paul kalana the-- and I went out to Aspen this summer have you guys read when breath becomes air a lot of you have yeah it's so good and if those of you who haven't read it or may think you don't want to read it because it seems awfully sad it is awfully sad it's awfully sad and it will make you a much better person and it will make you appreciate your life so buck up and read the book it's written by a man named Paul kelana thie who at 36 while he was finishing his residency in neurosurgery at Stanford found out he had stage 4 lung cancer and he wrote this book as he was dying and I went out to Aspen this summer and I interviewed his wife Lucy on stage of the Aspen Institute was astonishing the perks of my job are unbelievable namely that I can bring my dog with me everywhere and nobody gives me any grief anyway going forward Jane Hamilton's the excellent Lombard Louise Erdrich Schley Rose it was a great year for nonfiction as well and by the way for those of you who are madly typing this into your phones I write a blog I hate that word so much every month amusing our fantastic online literary magazine that the genius Mary Laura Philpott puts together for us yeah let's hear it for Mary Laura and those penguins man and so anything that I have read and I liked is on there don't don't panic lab girl but I hope jaren if you're interested at all in science even if you're not interested in science but you're just interested in a really really well-written fascinating book I think I said LaRose by Louise Erdrich but then I skipped over it it's my favorite Louise Erdrich book which is really saying something and you know how I say that everybody writes the same book over and over again Louise's map is something unspeakable happens in the first eight pages and then either it gets better or worse but everybody deals for the rest of the book with the unspeakable thing that happens in the first eight pages but I love this book another book that I read recently that I thought was fantastic was called in the darkroom by Susan Faludi incredible Susan Faludi wrote backlash she's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist she is after Gloria Steinem probably America's four most feminists and she had this mean bully of a father and after her parents got divorced when she was in high school she and her father fell out of touch and she really hadn't heard from him in 25 years he moved back to Budapest where he was from and then she gets an email from him saying just wanted to catch up by the way my name is Stephanie now and I thought maybe you would like to write a book about me and she goes to Hungary and her father transgendered at 75 and it's not even really about that and now wants to be her best girlfriend it is about the Holocaust it is about the Hungarian Jews it is a history lesson that you just can't believe and I'm always so impressed I call this the the Hamilton principle when somebody can take a story that we all think we know when you just think I just don't have another Holocaust book in me and somebody can retell and take a slant on this story and teach me so many things I didn't know and make it all new and fresh again which is what Hamilton did and it's a really really amazing book Jackie Woodson was here this week another Brooklyn also fantastic and very short I like to balance out the very short novels with the giant novels and if you haven't read brown girl dreaming which was Jackie's last book and it is supposedly a middle school reader and the first person I bought it for was my 94 year old mother-in-law and I think I've bought 20 copies of that book I every single person I know wants to read that book and loves it when I give it to them and then of course there is always dogs as I see them which you guys are all going to buy and really love yes well I what if I have will I cuz yes I have will I want have I read the Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante yes yes yes and you know who is the first person to tell me I think Jane Hamilton Maile Molloy I mean so many people told me to read those books and my problem is I am NOT very good anymore at reading books that are already out I read books that are four months away from coming out and also to start on a four book series that's massive I just kept thinking oh I'm never going to get to it and I picked up the first book a couple of times and I put it down and it was like the book that was always in my suitcase that I never got to and when I finally started it I read all four of those books in like ten days I didn't do anything else I went down the Elena Ferrante rabbit hole and there was there was nothing else in the world for me and it's so interesting because I won't say those are my favorite books although they would be very very high up there they're not in the top ten but it was the most profound reading experience I've ever had was the most profound relationship with a book I have ever had reading those Elena Ferrante books and I want to say if you read the first half of my brilliant friend and you don't like it quit quit it's not going to get better for you so I have talked to people who read the first one who hated it who were left cold by it who just said I didn't connect that's fine don't go on it's not going to get better it's going to get worse for me it just got better and better and and I almost didn't know what to do when they were over and I kept buying sets of four of them my mom read them I mean my mother was like where's the next one and I keep saying you've got to buy the first two together because if you finished the first one at one o'clock in the morning you gotta have the second one right away every one I finished I would read at least 20 pages of the next one and I felt that way again about the Patrick Melrose novels as well and they they have a similar sort of electricity and roughness did you read those the Patrick Melrose oh you have such a horrifying disgusting treat in store for you that is such an amazing reading experience when Jonathan Franzen was here somebody said to him it was an audience question if you could recommend one book and one author who would it be and and he in that very friends in issue era but he said if I had to only recommend one book it would be the same book I would recommend independent people yeah so it was given to me by my friend be Archie Olufsen we were out to dinner one night and he said so it was always referred to this as the Jeopardy question from hell who are some of your favorite Icelandic authors and he sent me a copy of independent people and which with all respect to Karen's choice to name the book store Parnassus I wanted to name it independent people after the Haldol accidents novel that really is my favorite book and I and you want to talk about a book that if you don't like that book by page 30 it's really not going to get better I mean people either hate that book or love that book and Franzen said if I had to pick just one author it would be Elena Ferrante so who knew yes when I was in Chautauqua this summer I talked on stage with Roger Rosenblatt about process and did I use the same process to write this book that I did with previous books I did I mean insofar as I put a whole book together before I start and I know exactly where it's going and who the players are and what order things will happen and it was a little easier for obvious reasons for me to put this together because I had a clearer structure in mind I would say this book was a little easier to write than most of my books but it was this or maybe I'm just getting older and better yes okay the question is on my Parnassus Instagram account which of course has nothing at all to do with me and I've never actually seen because I yeah again Mary Laura Philpott yeah I don't I don't have any relationship to social media and it was about I had done the read harder challenge what was it from Brook riot thank you very much and it was because I was signing 1,800 books at Ingram warehouse last week in Gale vennett was reading the questions to me over on her phone and in some ways I cheated it so it's fabulous and I highly recommend you do this Gale was doing it with her whole family and it's a list of about 20 or 25 maybe book topics like read an entire book out loud to someone else read a book over 500 pages read a book that was written the decade you were born and read a book under a hundred pages read a book by an East Asian read a book in the read the first book in a series that was written by a person of color I mean they're just very very specific questions that make read a horror novel make you go out in a lot of different directions I cheated because you're supposed to read all of those books in a calendar year and while I had done most and felt so good that I had read this is in Faludi book since one of the questions was read a book either by or about a transgendered person I was like yes so you're supposed to read them all in one year and I obviously was filling it out for a blog post so I cheated and used some books that I had already read but what was interesting to me about that experience is that that's reading harder is exactly what owning a bookstore makes you do or working in a bookstore because I am constantly reading books that five years ago you could not have paid me to read because I read Henry James over and over again I read maybe a half a dozen new books a year and now I'm really lucky if I read one classic a year and it's very exciting to me to have at this point in my life this giant shift in my reading and and to take a test like that and anything that makes us go in different directions my favorite example of that is when we're picking books for our first editions Club which you guys should also all check out it's like fruit of the Month Club only it doesn't rot we pick out a signed first edition every month and mail it to you and so there's a whole team of us who are constantly reading books that are going to be out in a few months and it was my turn to read and I had to read station eleven by Emily st. John Mandel and I was like post-apocalyptic fiction never would never ever and I had to read it and I did and again just one of the best books that I read last year or the year before whenever it came out and a book that we just sell and sell and sell because we all feel so passionately about it and that's a book that completely would have passed me by if I hadn't been working in a bookstore or been taking a test like that yes do I reread books almost never because life is short and I'm a good reader and I can usually catch it the first time when I say I reread Henry James I mean I reread the awkward age it was really hard I mean the only things that I would be interested in reading were either things that were very hard or things at very different points in my life I read Anna Karenina when I was 21 and I loved Anna and Vronsky and all of the stuff about Kitty and Levin and the peasants just bored my socks off I read it again when I was 50 I despised Anna and Vronsky I thought Karenin was the hero of the story they were so self-important and boring and childish and I loved Kitty and Levin in the peasants so I mean there are very very few books that really can show you something at different times in your life and you want to spend that time with them I recently reread the four rabbit novels by John Updike and that was a very important thing and I didn't even know why I was doing it but it was really my subconscious taking care of me because my father was dying and my father had been dying for years and I was reading rabbit at rest with my sister on the plane going out to catch my father before he died I read the last sentence of the fourth rabbit angstrom book no spoiler here it is called rabbit at rest he dies in the I closed the book I said to my sister I finished the rabbit novels I picked up my phone I turned it on and Carl called and said your dad's died and and I thought this is why I've been doing this I mean I've been I've been using Updike to get ready for this moment so there are there are things I reread our town all the time I mean there are there things that are just sort of a touchstone for me that I have to go back to all the time yes do I think that the success of Parnassus has spilled over to other independent bookstores I think other independent bookstores are successful right now and we are all on the rise and it is a wave all ships rise yeah I I don't think that Parnassus is responsible for that I think that we've done a great job raising awareness this is the very weird thing about being an Patchett which you know when I speak about myself in the third person I can do this thing that other booksellers can't do it would be very rude if other booksellers did but for some reason when I do it people think it's charming and it's this if you want to use Amazon that is absolutely okay with me I care that you read not how you read but if you want to use Amazon and you want to order your books online then you are not allowed to come into our store and talk to our smart staff who's reading the books and pick it up and smell it and read the flap copy and come to our author events and come bring your children at first storytime and hang out when you've got 30 minutes to kill before picking your kids up at school and then go home and buy your books off of Amazon that applies to not buying your flowers at Home Depot after talking to the people at flower Mart for an hour about pesticides you know it's we just forget so for some reason it's my job to just keep putting that out there if they're this is this is for everything if there are things you like in your community it is your responsibility to keep those things alive if you don't like them great don't use them let them die a natural death that is thus is the way of retail but if you like them and you use them then it is on you and boy do I feel like Nashville gets that boy do I feel like you guys have been so great to us and so supportive and I don't feel like this is a problem but I was in turn row books in Greenwood Mississippi the poorest poorest little town in the Delta and such a lovely bookstore that is holding on by its fingernails and the owner was saying people come in every day with their phones and take pictures I mean like pull the book out and take the picture and and say oh I'm gonna go home and get this off of Amazon I can get it for three dollars cheaper off of Amazon really I would hunt you down and kill you so yes score for the Pulitzer Oh National Book Award you know my money is on Colson for everything I that that is such an important book and and I have been reading him since the intuitionist if you guys haven't read the intuitionist oh my god that is such an amazing book especially any of you who like station 11 it's sort of a weird futuristic book about elevator inspectors but it's very exciting when it's somebody I know him I don't know I'm super well but I know him a little bit and he's a good guy and he's been in the game a long time he's written a zombie novel he's written about poker he's written about elevator inspectors he's written about John Henry I mean he's he really has a very very wide canvas and he's good every time and to see this book come out and just how hard how beautiful and hard and smart it is and another book that really fits in the Hamilton principle of making me as a reader wake up and say okay yeah I'm ready to read another book about slavery I didn't think I was ready to read another book about slavery but this this book tells it in a way that keeps my eyes wide open and with it so that's that's where I'm at Coulson all the way yes and then yeah hang on cuz I'll forget let me just do that so I said on NPR that Commonwealth is a book that I should have written when I was 25 because that's when people write their autobiographical first novel but the nice thing about writing it the way that I did is that now I know I can write an imaginative novel and I don't feel like I'm flat out of things you know if I think if I had written this book first I would think oh well that was a nothing left but I know now that I can do a lot of different things second half how many manuscripts I don't do that I don't scrap manuscripts I because I do it all in my head I scrap ideas I mean I've come up with loads of ideas that have gone nowhere but I don't write a book and throw it away I have two friends who do that I just it just looks brutal I am now turning my face to nicky Kaufman how are we doing Nicky we had two more okay Nicky tell yes I will be at Southern Festival of Books and when I am at Southern Festival of Books I'm gonna be with two people that I'm very excited about one one of my best friends Beverly Lowry who writes true crime and she wrote a book called who killed these girls how Beverly Lowry does this I will never know she is a brilliant writer and it was about the girls who were killed in the yogurt shop in Austin Texas in 1980 and the people who were put in prison were all exonerated so who in fact killed them and I will be in conversation with her and I really urge you guys to come to that again true crime top of my list of things that I don't like but Beverly is a brilliant brilliant thinker and researcher and her books are fantastic and then I will be in conversation with Adam Haslett who wrote imagine me gone which was another book this year that I absolutely loved and I don't know him and I'm so excited I'm such a fan of his and I got his email and I emailed him the other night and I said do you want to read should we both read or should we just talk and then I said you know what this is like the busiest time and the busiest day and the only time I am gonna be able to be with you is the hour we are onstage and I don't want to read I just want to talk to you because I'm never gonna get to talk to you otherwise and he wrote me back and he said I am so sick of reading we'll just talk so those are the two things and that reminds me the other thing I'm going to be doing at Southern Festival right after that event is introducing him so glad I remembered this Matthew desmond who wrote my other favorite book and if you want to know what book i I don't and the Pulitzer in nonfiction this year is going to be anybody's guess evicted by Matthew Desmond a giant social justice book which that is a category of books I love so all of you who read behind the beautiful forevers right you read that book and you loved it it was so interesting poverty in Mumbai well folks try poverty in Milwaukee because there is a lot for us to learn way way closer to home and Mathew Desmond does it brilliantly I cannot recommend that strongly enough so those are the events okay this is the last question is it good well see give a give to your best shot oh yeah that's a nice way to end okay so I moved here the week before my sixth birthday and I was gone from the time I was 17 until I was thirty I came home I went on a date with a nice guy and now I live here and we will we will always chances are live here no matter how much we talk about leaving our families here I know that Nashville is changing and it is in so many ways an entirely different City and sometimes I will drive down a street that I haven't driven down in two years and I think oh my god I'm lost I don't know where I am who is that architect who is building exactly the same house all over the city and can that person you know you talk about me writing the same book over and over again this person is building the same house every single place I go and yet there is something about Nashville that will always be the same that's Percy and Edwin waterpark that's I always say it's the it's the shrubbery it's the undergrowth it's it's the plant life it's the humidity it's the the cicadas it's that feeling that if we all just left for a month none of this would be here when we got back that the plant life and the bug life would just eat the whole city and it would just be a grassy field when we got back it's always pressing on nature no matter how overdeveloped we get nature is just absolutely pressing in on Nashville all the time and I love that it's just a place that I feel like I understand so well and it is a city that deeply cares about all things independent if it's the music if it's education if it's bookstores or hardware stores or whatever I mean I I just feel coffee shops popsicles I could go on and on I just feel like the people in this city no matter how they change no matter how many new waves of people come in that's sort of the ethos of the city and people embrace it and keep it going so you know it's hard not to wish for it to stop you want to pull up the gangplank and say okay California go on home now but that's what we are and and I think that we are very welcoming and very open and we need some Syrians that's what we need in Nashville now so okay let me just tell you how this works because I know you're not going home to buy your book from Amazon because it scared you all of the books that are here at the table every single Patchett book that is here tonight as well as these books I have signed so you have choices you can just leave okay that's a choice you can buy a sign book and think that's enough which they are first editions so if you have any interest in that a sign first edition in which I have not written ant for happy birthday and Sally is ultimately a much more valuable book if you would like me to write happy birthday Aunt Sally I will be sitting out there and I will be happy at the exact same pen to write whatever you want me to write above my name if you would like me to write something above my name and you also want to get out of here you can come to the book store you can leave off a book you can buy a book and leave it off there and I will be home at least one day every week for the next six weeks and will come in and do the personalizations so those are all your choices guys neighbors friends family it's been such a pleasure to look around this room and see people that I know and I love it gives me a lot of heart to take it out on the road so thank you I love you you

Channel: Nashville Public Library

Views: 3,035

Keywords: salon@615, ann patchett

Id: r9jQCMrShT0

Length: 60min 55sec (3655 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 01 2016