Best-selling author Ann Patchett is known for her emotional literary fiction, including The Dutch House, a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. We love her newest book, Whistler, so much that we made it our June pick for the GH Book Club! It’s a touching story about chosen family and the power of love, storytelling, and memory.
As the GH books editor, I sat down with Ann Patchett to talk all about her newest novel and what inspired it. Here, she discusses her writing process, fiction as autobiography, and grief.
SV: Your work needs no introduction, but I'd love to hear in your own words how you’d describe Whistler.
AP: Daphne Fuller is 53, and she sees someone following her in a museum. The man is Eddie, her stepfather from when she was nine years old, and they pick back up on the profound and loving relationship they had. It's a book about how if you have one person in your life who really loves you and sees you and supports you when you're a child, it can make all the difference. It's not a romantic love story, but it is, I feel, very much a love story.
SV: Whistler explores the importance of chosen family. What was the inspiration behind it?
AP: One of my closest friends died, Jim Fox. The book is dedicated to him. I started to think about taking Jim's voice—not his story, but his spirit—and putting all of the love that I had for him into a character, Eddie.
Where does all that love go when a person dies? Where does their voice go? There's a period of time after loss where you can still hear someone so clearly in your mind. The way Eddie speaks is the way Jim spoke.
The story isn’t real, but it's autobiographical because I'm taking all of this love that is my love and putting it onto these characters.
SV: Things can be emotionally true without being factually true. That's something I love about fiction.
AP: Absolutely. Zadie Smith told me once that autobiographical fiction isn't necessarily what happened to you. It can be what you're afraid of, or what you hope for. And that was so freeing and expansive for me. I've always wondered why it is something could feel so autobiographical when it absolutely didn't happen.
I came up with this story in a matter of days when I realized I could channel Jim’s voice. The thought was like holding on to a golden thread. It was like I had beaten the system. I had figured out a way to be with him again. It was like if you found a secret door in your house that you could walk through and be with your best friend again. And you're not sad. You're ecstatic. It's not the way I usually work, but writing it was a really happy experience.
SV: I love the way you talk about that. It's almost like a little piece of immortality that you can continue being together.
AP: That's exactly what Eddie says in the end of the book. I could do that for Jim. You want to be able to keep doing things for the people you love who are dead, and doing things for the people who loved them.
SV: Unfortunately, I’m very familiar with terminal illness. My dad has a rare cancer, and I could feel that Whistler’s depictions of loving somebody with that kind of diagnosis were based in experience. How did you find a way to write about it that shows both the grief and the joy?
AP: Because I'm a writer, which means I'm home when everybody else is at work, I have taken so many people to chemo. I have taken people who I'm very, very close to, and I have taken people who I barely knew. But every time I've had that experience, I have loved it.
Chemo is like going on a road trip with somebody without a radio. You're in this little space together. You have a sense of mortality. You can talk about anything.
I felt like my head was going to explode from all of the love and the beauty and the closeness. We were just all our best, most tender selves. And anytime I've ever been to chemo with somebody, I've had some variation of that experience. It's been one of the most beautiful experiences of my life to go and be with these people. It's all of that energy that you can then put into the novel.
SV: How do you feel your writing has changed throughout your career?
AP: None of my work has ever been autobiographical. I didn't want anybody to read my books and think, “oh, I really know her.” But when I wrote Commonwealth in 2016, everything changed and I thought, I'm not going to fight it anymore. I'm going to find my stories a lot closer to home.
In the past I would spend an enormous amount of energy constructing elaborate stage sets and costumes for all the characters so it wouldn't look like me. Now, it doesn't matter.
You know, my mother was married three times. And then I thought, actually, in this story, there needs to be 3 husbands. So what? I'm going to just do it. It works.
All that matters is that I write the best story I can. Getting older just means I'm more relaxed about it all.
Whistler by Ann Patchett
SV: You've had such amazing success as an author. Has that added a sense of pressure to your writing process?
AP: I don't really think about it in terms of success. I have had great success writing literary fiction, which is kind of like saying I've had great success as a postage stamp. Even if you are the craziest, most successful fiction writer there is, people don't read a ton of literary fiction. So there's a lot of freedom to do whatever you want to do.
To write a book about kind people, it's an underrepresented group. There are a lot more novels about dystopia and betrayal and terrible things, and yet everywhere I go I see so much kindness.
It's exactly like hanging out at chemo. You can say I hung out at chemo today and I saw the most unbelievable acts of generosity and tenderness and kindness. Or you can say I hung out at chemo today and I saw so much pain and suffering and despair. Both things are true, but you bring your own set of eyes to it. I'm very happy to be writing what I write because of that. Looking for the kindness, it’s who I am. It's just the way I see the world.
SV: This book opens and closes at the Met. What is your favorite way to spend a day at an art museum?
AP: It's funny, my first thought when you said that was alone. It's very hard to find a person you can go to a museum with who feels the same way that you do. My husband wants to stay together the whole time we're at a museum, which I find impossible. So to be able to go in and really look at something that's meaningful to you, maybe just a couple of paintings and to be with them, that's lovely.
