Ann Patchett on why stalkers want her to read their novels

Ann Patchett is one of the most influential people in publishing. She's also known for being one of the nicest.

Her interviews often feature stories about her many famous friends, many of whom frequently pop up both in her Instagram reels and her bookstore, Parnassus Books in Nashville.

Her pal Tom Hanks narrated the audio version of her novel The Dutch House; when she asked Meryl Streep to narrate Tom Lake, Streep said yes before even reading the book.

Patchett's name also crops up in literary gossip: she helped Virginia Evans publish The Correspondent, a debut novel whose word-of-mouth popularity made it an international bestseller.

Her first claim to fame, however, is as the author of acclaimed books including Bel Canto (2001), Commonwealth (2016) and the aforementioned Tom Lake (2023).

Like Tom Lake, which was an ode to finding contentment in the small moments in life, her latest novel, Whistler, takes a resolutely positive worldview.

Whistler's main character, Daphne, a teacher in her 50s, is wandering through The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York with her husband Jonathan when she runs into her stepfather Eddie, now in his 80s.

They haven't seen each other since she was a child and immediately resume their previously close attachment.

"She's thrilled to see Eddie, and Eddie is thrilled to see her, and right from the start, they decide they are going to be great friends," Patchett tells ABC Radio National's The Book Show.

In the process, they reconsider the past, including a traumatic car accident that preceded their estrangement.

Kate Evans, the host of ABC Radio National's The Bookshelf, believes Patchett is making a political statement in Whistler.

"She's making an argument for a good, kind world, which could sound terribly saccharine, but there's a real edge to this book and its view of childhood," she says.

Stepfathers and stepdaughters

The book's central relationship — between a stepfather and stepdaughter — is one that is often maligned in popular culture.

But in Whistler, Daphne's reunion with Eddie enriches both their lives.

"Daphne just adored him," Patchett says.

"He was everything she wanted to be. He was smart. He was bookish; he was a books editor. He wanted to be a writer; she wanted to be a writer. He took her seriously. She just loved him, and any time they got to spend any time together was a really happy time."

When Daphne's mother, Abigail, ended the relationship a year into the marriage, Eddie was suddenly out of the picture.

"She didn't just divorce him; she banished him from their lives. He wasn't allowed to have any contact with Daphne or her sister, Leda," Patchett says.

"And since this was a pre-internet age, pre-cell phones, when you're nine years old and your mother says, 'he's gone', you're never going to see him again. He's gone, and after a while, you stop looking."

Patchett says she is always drawn to family as a subject.

"I had a great, big, sprawling, messy family when I was growing up and in ways it was awful and in ways it was fantastic — lots and lots of different people coming in and out."

Like Daphne (whose mother remarried after divorcing Eddie), Patchett had three father figures in her life, a story she tells in an essay published first in The New Yorker and then in her 2021 collection, These Precious Days.

She says she wanted to tell a different story about stepfamily in her latest novel.

"I've had several people who've read this book say, 'I got really worried when the stepfather shows up … that something creepy was going to happen'. And I was like, 'No, no, no, it's a really good stepfather.

"The stepmother isn't always bad; a stepfather isn't always bad."

Patchett acknowledges that her experience of divorce wasn't necessarily universal. Families can get messy.

Often, she says "the problem isn't so much having your parents get divorced, the problem is who those divorced parents bring into your life".

"You can really wind up with a bad step-parent or bad step-siblings, and I certainly have seen that happen."

But Patchett believes her parents' divorce made her resilient. "It also made me very open-hearted with people," she says.

"My mother married three times, my father married twice, and I primarily grew up with cousins of my stepfather's who didn't have any children, so that's a lot of parents.

"And if one parent didn't come through … you always had somebody else you could go to and talk to.

"I had a vast pool of parents to work from, and because of that, I wasn't really ever disappointed in any of them."

The complex bond between sisters

While Patchett's childhood experience of family was one of abundance and joy, it wasn't perfect.

In Whistler, Daphne and her sister Leda share a close bond from a young age. In real life, things were different for Patchett and her sister, Heather.

"I was in my late 30s before my sister and I were close. We were not close growing up. My sister absolutely could not stand me from the time I was born," she says.

"When my parents brought me home from the hospital — she's three-and-a-half years older than I am — she immediately broke out in a horrible case of hives, and she didn't really get rid of them until she was 40.

"What I was always doing my whole life was knocking on her door and going, 'Hi, I'm your sister. You want to come out and play? You want to do something? You want to have some fun?' And she would slam the door.

"But with just sheer force of will and good cheer, I wore her down, and we are really, really close now."

Patchett, in her typically upbeat way, says she doesn't harbour hard feelings towards her sister for the years they didn't get along.

"It was my sister's responsibility to be angry about the circumstances of our life," she says.

"I look back and think, 'Oh, wow, there was a lot to be angry about'.

"But because she was angry, I didn't have to be angry. And because she was angry and I never was angry, everybody liked me best, and it wasn't fair."

In another parallel between the book and real life, a car accident featured in both Daphne's and Patchett's childhoods.

While Daphne wasn't seriously hurt, the episode is a pivotal moment that is revisited throughout the novel.

The accident Patchett and her sister were involved in was much more serious.

"My sister was in the front seat, and I was in the back seat, and we were hit by a drunk driver," Patchett says.

"My sister was terribly, terribly hurt, and I was moderately hurt; I was cosmetically hurt. And that seemed to be the symbol for everything that happened … She took the hit, and I got off."

Dedicated to a friend

While Patchett had two stepfathers, the character of Eddie Triplett is not based on either.

Whistler is dedicated to Patchett's friend Jim Fox, who died from pancreatic cancer in 2024 on his 85th birthday.

Like Eddie, Fox worked in publishing, as head legal counsel at HarperCollins.

In a 2025 essay Patchett wrote for The New Yorker, she describes accompanying Fox to a chemo session not long before his death, pushing him the three blocks from his Manhattan apartment to the hospital in a wheelchair.

"He held his cane, which he liked to use as a gondolier's pole to help me along," she wrote. "He sang."

In Whistler, Daphne takes Eddie to his chemo sessions, too, and like Fox, Eddie faces illness and discomfort with grace.

"I wrote this book about a year after [Jim] had died," Patchett says.

"I just got this idea: I want to write a book that's not about Jim and it's not about me … but I'm going to take all the love that Jim had for me and all the love I had for Jim, and I'm going to put it in this book."

The result was not therapeutic — "there was no grief at all in this book," Patchett says — but uplifting.

"It really made it such a joyful thing to write because I felt so strongly that I was hanging out with my friend, who I wanted to be hanging out with."

The inherent goodness of people

Patchett's reputation for being approachable has a downside, as she explained in a session at the Melbourne Writer's Festival in 2024 (broadcast on ABC Radio National's Big Ideas).

"I will get stalkers, and the stalkers want me to read their novel," Patchett told the audience.

In one case, a man alarmed staff by coming to her bookstore so often the police were called.

"This guy said, 'Ann Patchett promised she would read my novel; she promised she would get it published'."

But, generally, it's Patchett's nature to look on the bright side of life.

"I do believe in the inherent goodness of people," she says.

"I also think that we are all just a bag of chemicals, and your chemical composition is either your good fortune or your curse.

"And I have a very cheerful chemical composition. I have always been this way."

People sometimes accuse her of being "a Pollyanna" and describe her characters, mostly nice people, as "unrealistic".

Stories about "horrible people" are often seen as truer to life, she says.

But making a story about nice people interesting is in many ways more challenging than writing about people behaving badly.

"Someone said to me recently, 'Rage is a low-hanging fruit'," Patchett says.

"If you decide to see the good in other people or turn the situation around and find the good in it, it actually takes some muscle."

Being nice is a muscle Patchett flexes in real life.

Years ago, she and her friend, children's author and "famous swearer" Kate DiCamillo, decided to give up swearing during Lent.

"I found that it lowered my temperature by 10 degrees," she says.

"Instead of swearing, either out loud or in my mind when something irritating happened, I had to stop and think about how I actually felt, because the feeling was usually more complicated than just a single word that you could scream, like if you drop a hammer on your toe.

"I never went back to swearing — and I really swore, I really did."

The conscious decision to forgo swearing was symbolic of a broader aspiration to be an optimistic person.

"It's a way of controlling your thoughts, trying to find the good," she says.

"If you say, I'm going to make a point to find the good and to talk about the good, it very quickly becomes the truth of your life, that there is that goodness in your life."

Whistler is published by Bloomsbury.