Patchett has two stepchildren with her husband but has never had a burning desire to be a mother. Eventually, Patchett’s mother would divorce him, too. (Their father, a police officer, was an inspiration for the father in “Commonwealth.”) Their stepfather had four children of his own, which made for complicated interfamilial relationships. For some of us, that’s the definition of a good time.”īorn in Los Angeles, Patchett and her sister moved to a farm outside of Nashville after their parents divorced and their mother remarried. I remember it as a fun conversation - taking apart a fictional engine and pondering how it might go back together. How elements of it might be useful in a story. “I talked about the circumstances as I understood them, and what had led to this unusual family trauma. “As it happened, I have a friend whose mother had done the very thing that Ann’s fictional mother had done in her book, which seemed completely implausible to Ann,” Kingsolver said. When she asked how the new book was going, “Ann made this miserable face, and I said ‘O.K., let’s talk,’” Kingsolver said via email. In her case, she was staying with Patchett in the midst of a long book tour. This is the sort of thing that happens when novelists get together, Kingsolver says. “Well, not trash, but she said there were major problems. “She said, ‘I really like it, but the whole third section is trash,’” Patchett recalls.
She pulled it together with help from a number of friends, all writers themselves.Īnd from Jane Hamilton, to whom she always reads drafts of her books aloud (and vice versa), she received the gift of tough love. Patchett had just a few months left before her no-going-back deadline, and like an unruly toddler, the book would not behave. I thought, ‘I’m going to stand here in the kitchen and eat these little fluffy things and throw everything else out and make it over again.’” “But actually it was like burning a cake. “I thought, ‘This is like death,’” she says.
She switched from first person to third, but that didn’t help. “It was like Thelma and Louise going over a cliff. “It was horrible to write,” she says cheerfully. Patchett began work on “The Dutch House” in 2016 two years later, she threw her draft away. I began to write a book about the kind of stepmother I am afraid of being.” (This is the wicked Andrea, who marries Maeve and Danny’s father.) “It’s about what you’re afraid might happen. “It hit me that autofiction is not about what happened to you,” Patchett says.
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