‘But I wonder, would you ask Jonathan Franzen the same questions? He doesn’t have children.’ When the interview aired, all the questions about my childlessness had been edited out.” Don’t you worry about that?’ … ‘I don’t mind talking about this,’ I said. ‘Chances are you’ll be alone at the end of your life. “‘Your husband is considerably older than you are,’ the host says. In the essay “There Are No Children Here,” Patchett recounts being interviewed on a national radio show. She married her second husband, Karl, after 11 years of dating he is 16 years her senior and a medical doctor who earned a master’s in philosophy and theology at Oxford. In 2017, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.Īlthough she did indeed divorce her first husband, she never had children to support. In 2011, she opened Parnassus Books in Nashville, turning it into a writers’ haven and cultural oasis. at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, has written eight novels (her most recent, “ The Dutch House,” was a Pulitzer finalist), four works of nonfiction and two children’s books. Now 58, Patchett graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, earned her M.F.A.
When her mother married for the third time, Patchett was 27: “She didn’t see either of her first two husbands anymore, but both men were central in my life: my father wanting me to be more like him, my stepfather wanting to be more like me.”Īny aspiring writer would. “He spent five mornings a week in analysis for more years than should be legal. Stepfather Mike “broke plates and put his fist through hollow doors and thought I was the second coming of Christ,” she writes. She followed him there, her two young daughters in tow, and married him. Patchett’s mother, a nurse, fell in love with a surgeon who moved to Nashville. Without ever meaning to, my father taught me at a very early age to give up on the idea of approval.” “Having someone who believed in my failure more than my success kept me alert,” Patchett writes.
Because, just like him, she would surely end up divorced with children to support. cop who scorned her writing ambitions and encouraged her to be a dental hygienist. In “These Precious Days,” Ann Patchett’s excellent collection of essays, she recalls her own father, an L.A. “She stole my writing style!” he declared to a friend. My father, who harbored literary aspirations of his own, made the rounds, accepting congratulations, until he could bear it no longer. When I published my first book in 1996, about my mom, my sister and me, there was a party.
THESE PRECIOUS DAYS Essays By Ann Patchett
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