Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett (born December 2, 1963) is an American novelist, essayist, and memoirist. In 2002 her novel Bel Canto won the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction.

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Quotes

In Autobiography of a Face, Lucy talked about how she spent her childhood thinking that real life would start after the surgeries stopped.
- Truth and Beauty: A Friendship. Fourth Estate. 2004. p. 182. ISBN 9780007190935. (257 pages)

If all fairy tales begin "Once upon a time," then all graduation speeches begin "When I was sitting where you are now." We may not always say it, at least not in those exact words, but it's what graduation speakers are thinking. We look out at the sea of you and think, Isn't there some mistake? I should still be sitting there. I was that young fifteen minutes ago, I was that beautiful and lost.
- What Now? (pbk ed.). Harper Collins. 2009. ISBN 9780061842467. (112 pages; 1st edition 2008)

The years spent in the freelance trenches eventually paid off; I would go on to have some remarkable assignments. I've toured the great opera houses of Italy, gone on a mock honeymoon in Hawaii, driven an RV across the American West, all on someone else's dime. Whenever people ask how they can get those same kinds of assignments, I recommend what worked for me: eight years writing freelance articles for Seventeen.
- "Nonfiction, an Introduction". This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. A&C Black. 2013. ISBN 9781408842409. (320 pages; collection of nonfiction essays)

“We were all standing there waiting on the photographer,” my father told me later on the phone. “And Mike said, ‘You know what she’s doing, don’t you? She’s going to wait until the three of us are dead and then she’s going to write about us. This is the picture that will run with the piece.’ ” My father said that the idea hadn’t occurred to him, and it wouldn’t have occurred to Darrell, but, as soon as Mike said it, they knew he was right.
He was right. That was exactly what I meant to do. That is exactly what I’m doing now.
- (October 5, 2020) "Three Fathers". The New Yorker.

I'm always writing essays—eight hundred words on owning a bookstore for a newspaper in London, my ten favorite books of the year for a magazine in Australia, an introduction for a newly reissued classic, maybe a little piece about dogs. Essays never filled my days, but they reminded me that I was still a writer when I wasn't writing a novel.
- "Introduction. Essays Don't Die". These Precious Days: Essays. HarperCollins. 2021. ISBN 9780063092808. (336 pages)

Patchett is interested in how people, in families and elsewhere, come to terms with painful circumstances; how they press beauty from constraint, assuming artificial or arbitrary roles that then become naturalized, like features of the landscape.
- Katy Waldman, (August 7, 2023) "Taste of Cherry (book review of Tom Lake by Ann Patchett)". The New Yorker.