On Attention, Appreciation, and Being Where You Are

“I love my life,” says writer Ann Patchett. “I’ve gotten to do so much more than I ever dreamed possible. I write, I make art. I’m not sitting around thinking, ‘I haven’t done what’s really important to me yet.’ ”

Born in 1963 in Los Angeles, Patchett has written nine novels, including Tom Lake, The Dutch House, Run, Bel Canto, and The Patron Saint of Liars. Her nonfiction includes a memoir, Truth & Beauty: A Friendship, and two essay collections, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage and These Precious Days. Her work appears in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, and Vogue, among others. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Humanities Medal, and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, Time named her one of the world’s 100 most influential people. She lives in Nashville, where she owns Parnassus Books.

On a Nashville evening and Tokyo morning, Patchett and I talked about devoting time to what’s important, why death is ever-present for her, and using social capital to do good. 

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You’ve written about the importance of not procrastinating. Endings—including our own—are a certainty and we don’t know when they’ll come, but we tend to fritter away our days because we think we’ll have time later. How do you make sure you do what matters most to you? The way it works is when I’m writing, I don’t see people, I don’t go out. I can’t even say I’m a terrible friend—I’m not a friend. I don’t want to have anything on the calendar. Lunch is the death of art. Never, never go out for lunch when you’re writing. I just say no to everything. I stop exercising, and I stop eating properly. I’m just working.

Lunch is the death of art. Never, never go out for lunch when you’re writing.

And then I have periods where I’m not writing and I’m not thinking about writing, where I’m living my life and fully inhabiting other aspects of it: taking a trip with my husband, spending the day in bed with a book, visiting my friends. 

Toward the end of his life, Philip Roth retired from writing fiction. Are you going to write novels until your final day? You never know, right? I don’t think about it so much as when will I decide to stop as when will the writing decide to stop. When will it leave me? 

I’m 61. This book that I’m working on right now, I’m writing in a way that’s totally different from how I’ve ever written. And I think, “Wow. Is this new, or is this my last book and I’m flaming out?” I don’t know. But I do think at this point in my life, this could be it. 

How aware are you of impermanence day to day? Well, there’s this insane present world in which death is abundant. And I’m at that place where my friends are dealing with cancer and the things we deal with at a certain time in life. I always say to my husband, “We’re birds on a wire. Right now, today, we’re OK.” Because he’s a doctor, he has such an awareness of this, and there’s nothing to do but say, “Today we got through. Today we were lucky, and it’s a call to pay attention to where we are and what we have.” And to appreciate this life because the life will stick around, but we will not stick around in it. 

Very often, we’re in denial about death. Why is it so present for you? Because it seems so logical: Nobody’s getting out of here alive. I have an old college friend who I went on a trip with a year or two ago. She said she hadn’t made a will. And I said, “Are you out of your mind?” And she said, “I’m not ready to die. I can’t let the concept of death in, because there cannot be a place for it.” And I said, “That’s not how it works. Death is right here, sitting between us in the car.” 

Are you at all afraid of death? I don’t think so. In an essay called “How to Practice,” I write about how I’m cleaning everything out and getting rid of everything as a kind of preparation for death. And I’m making sure that when I die, my papers are settled. In the closet behind me, there’s a big Tupperware container that says in giant letters: “Wills Are In This Box.” 

When I went to the lawyer with my husband to talk about our wills, the lawyer said to me, “If you give your husband everything when you die—all your royalties and all your artistic licensing—and three months later, he meets somebody who’s young and healthy and he marries her and puts it all in her name and then he dies, how do you feel about that scenario? This young woman who will have been around for only a few months and doesn’t know anything about you is going to get all your royalties and licenses.”

And I said, “I’m dead. What do I care? I hope she enjoys it. It doesn’t make any difference at all. Dead’s dead.” 

Growing older is a bardo transition we often struggle with in life. Are you finding it a challenge? Women always say you get to a certain point and you’re invisible. And that is not the case for me. If I’m in the grocery store, people recognize me. That’s very helpful, a little dopamine hit. If I’m walking the dog, people pull their cars over and say hi. 

The other part of it is very much about Buddhism, which is: “This is where I am.” To try to reach for the past, and make myself into somebody I used to be, means I’m not fully inhabiting the person that I am. I can struggle against it, or I can just inhabit it. 

To try to reach for the past, and make myself into somebody I used to be, means I’m not fully inhabiting the person that I am.

When I was young, I’d have a photo shoot and get contact sheets for jacket photos or magazines. And I’d look at those sixty photographs and think, “Oh, god.” Then, of course, when you’re having your picture taken for the next book, you go back and look at the last one and you think, “Fool, you were so beautiful. Now look at you, a slug.” At some point, I had to realize you always look good because you’re alive. I’m not going to spend my life wishing for winter if it’s summer. At 61, I’m not going to wish for 35. This is today. 

When do you most feel in between? For me, it’s writing. You hire a boat and a crew and you go out and find your spot. Then you put on the Jules Verne 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea suit, and you jump off the boat and you go down and do your work at the bottom of the ocean.

Then you have to come up because the oxygen’s running out, or the crew has to go home, or whatever. You can’t stay down there forever. You have to come up slowly and return to living in the world, with all the people you love and all the things you need to do, and know that no one has any idea what the bottom of the ocean looks like. Or what it is you do down there. And that’s just a very strange thing.

Did you ever read a book called Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke? It’s wonderful, a giant fantasy novel about magicians in England in the 1800s. There’s a character named Stephen Black, a servant. Every night he has to go to the underworld, where he is the king, and attend all these balls and have this whole other life with fairies. Then he comes back up, and he’s exhausted all day long as he tries to do his job as a servant. That’s as close as I’ve come to seeing a description of my life. I’m off doing these things that I couldn’t possibly explain or show, and then I have to come back up. 

That’s a beautiful example of a bardo between-state, of the creative suspension we go into when we write. The aloneness of it can indeed be strange, but it must also appeal to you—in your essay collection These Precious Days, you write, “I was a solitary kid, and I imagined a solitary life for myself.” As someone who was drawn to solitude, how did you end up starting a bookstore? Ignorance. Starting Parnassus Books was a snap decision, like finding out your symphony orchestra is going to go under and thinking, “Oh, I guess I’ll save the symphony.” I never wanted a bookstore. I didn’t even really like bookstores because I was always on book tours. Anyway, I opened this bookstore with a partner, she retired, and now I own the whole thing. It was such an accident, and yet has been so good for me because it has made me a member of my community. And because I have so much social capital that I can use to do good. It’s a joy to be able to promote other people’s work, to take a book that people may not have read and talk about it and get people to buy it. 

What you’re saying about social capital reminds me of your response on Instagram to a New York Times op-ed by David Brooks earlier this year. Brooks said, as you put it, that “literary fiction has lost its audacity and its place in the cultural conversation, and that writers aren’t pulling their weight, doing a good enough job, and we’re fading into a generalized mediocrity because of liberalism.” You recommended some books to Brooks that are “important and audacious and leading the way culturally,” such as Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman, Percival Everett’s James, Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, Richard Powers’s The Overstory, and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker. That whole thing with David Brooks was waking me up at night. I get mad about once every five years, but I was just mad. I said to a friend, “It’s like sitting in a bar and all of these fights are going on around you, and you look over and you think, ‘That’s not my fight. And that one over there is not my fight. Oh, this one is my fight.’ ” And then you have to get up and break a bottle over the edge of the bar and go fight. That’s the kind of thing I never could have done without the bookstore and social capital.

Do you have any regrets? No, no regrets. In my grade school class, I wasn’t the one you would’ve pegged to win. I was quiet and average and always in the back, really a mediocre kid. I have blown just galaxies past what anyone, including me, ever thought I could do with my life.

I also think there are choices. I do not want another life. I made a choice early on to not have children and to see it almost as two lives. There’s the life in which I had children—and I’m maternal enough to have pulled it off—but I don’t think I could have had children and had this career. I can look over now and say, “Oh, there could have been that version. And that would’ve been very happy.” But that’s nothing like regret.