By Staff
No Dogwood Fine Arts Festival author – and I've seen all but one – ever drew a reaction like the gasp Ann Patchett elicited at Dowagiac Middle School May 15.
"I have never read any of my books…" she said.
Great, I thought, we're on equal footing.
That's why I mention it more than two months later.
I have now read "Bel Canto," "Run" and "The Patron Saint of Liars," however, and feel more ready to review the notes I set aside.
I'm just a fly on the wall at these encounters, though she was very complimentary about Savannah's name as she signed her book.
Ten Union High School students met Patchett in the middle school choir room and were taken aback when the author from Tennessee informed them she might not be able to answer some questions about her first novel, "The Patron Saint of Liars," because she hasn't read it probably since they've been alive.
She published it in 1992.
Most of these girls were born in 1991.
That's what Patchett, who as an extra played a pregnant girl in a breakfast scene in the CBS Monday Night Movie of the Week – which she last saw in New York on Sept. 10, 2001, though it shows "approximately every 15 minutes" on Lifetime – meant.
"…Again."
By the time she finishes a novel, she's read it "30 times. You go over it again and again, editing and polishing. Your friends read it and mark it up for you. You read it out loud. Your editor reads it. You do copyediting and page proofs. By the time it becomes a book, you never want to see it again."
How does someone learn to write as elegantly as Patchett?
"I was a waitress and a fry cook," though "I had wanted to be a famous novelist for a while. I actually taught college for a little while after graduate school. I had all these things I had to do at night, like roll 150 packs of silverware and 'marry' the ketchup bottles – never eat ketchup in a restaurant.
"I decided to make up a story while I did my waitress chores. I was a short story writer and had published a lot of stories, but I really wanted to write a novel."
"I remember the central moment from which that idea (for The Patron Saint of Liars, about a Kentucky home for unwed mothers). At that point I had never written a novel, so I didn't know what an idea for a novel was," Patchett said, "but I remember thinking, she's going to give her children up, but she wants to have a little bit of time. When she goes into labor she makes the decision she's not going to make any noise. That was the genesis. Then: Who's in the room? Where are they? What's the house look like? What's the room look like? Who are her friends? Who's her best friend? What do they tell her to do? Where's she from? Where are the other people from? It spreads like a virus that goes out in all directions. It goes backward: How did she get there? Where does she go from here? When I started thinking about all the people in the room, I became less and less interested in Beatrice and more and more interested in Rose, who kind of seemed the most powerful of the girls in the room. Then I started thinking what her story is and where she came from."
Patchett got a fellowship and wrote her first novel on Cape Cod, the summer resort community deserted for the winter.
Or, as she referred to the desolate locale, the "very beating heart of nowhere."
"I hadn't written a word, but I got the whole thing worked out in my mind," Patchett recalled. "I got a road atlas, cut it up and taped all the pages together and planned out (Rose's) whole driving trip from California and where she stops. I started writing in 1990 and finished it April 1, edited it until May 1, drove it to New York and gave it to my agent, then drove home to Tennessee" to her job at Friday's in the "dark ages before cell phones. I got home and my mother came out of the house with a message – I hadn't checked in for days. Finishing that book was the single biggest thing in my life. It was the most important day of my life so far, finishing that book. Writing a book was the thing I had wanted to do all my life. It was a beautiful spring day and I wrote so fast, the guy downstairs from me would open up my door and scream up the staircase, 'Stop typing! I am so sick of listening to you type all the time.' He was a poet, so he didn't type much. All of sudden I realized I had typed the last sentence."
Since she knew the movie's writer and producer, she tagged along to the shoot at a North Carolina 4-H camp – "also in the middle of nowhere. I had to get up at 5 o'clock in the morning and take a bus for an hour to this place where they were filming," she said of the glamorous life making movies. "I wanted to be there for the whole five-week shoot. The writer said to me, 'You'll make it four days. Tops."
"I think I made it three days," Patchett said. "It was like being at an unbelievably boring cocktail party for 18 hours. Do any of you want to be actors? It was so hot and they had all of these 'pregnant' girls and cheesy nuns, who were wearing these long wooly things like burqas.
"The nuns were dropping like flies and chain-smoking. It was hysterical. I was 20 years older than all of the pregnant girls. I was in a scene where Son and Rose are making breakfast. She's scrambling eggs. They did this until there was a mountain of eggshells. It was such a cheesy movie. I watched it with my family and we were all so excited, but it was so bad it was good. The only other time I saw it was Sept. 10, 2001" in New York – the day before 9/11 terrorist attacks.
"The thing I would really like to say about this book, which is not something you'll probably ever hear a novelist say, is why this book is important to me" is that within the pages of "The Patron Saint of Liars" she learned to write a book.
When critics found her novel frustrating or unbelievable or questioned Rose's motives in leaving, "I always wanted to say, 'I wrote a book. I typed an entire novel out of my head.' I am extremely interested in narrative structure. To me, the decision to be made in the novel is who's telling the story. It can be a first-person point of view, second-person point of view, which is virtually never successful. There's one novel, 'Bright Lights, Big City,' in which someone pretty successfully pulls it off. Then there's third person. It can be limited, which means it's all in one character's head. Or it can be omniscient, which I think of as 'Russian third person.' Omniscience has always been compelling to me, but I didn't get there until my fourth novel. Every novel is creeping towards omniscience. In 'Patron Saint of Liars' I have three main characters who either don't communicate with one another at all or honestly, so, how did you get the information across as to what's in their head?"
Not knowing how to enter more than one head at a time or how to shift the point of view, "The only thing I could come up with was to have three first-person chunks of the book," Patchett said. "I could only write first-person narratives. I wasn't qualified to do anything else. It wasn't enough to just have it be Rose's story. In retrospect, three narratives seems like a big copout to me. If I had been a better novelist or been more advanced, I would have figured out a way to have done it in third person – but it's interesting because it seems to be what people like about the book. A lot of people say it's their favorite because it's kind of the nicest of my books.
"It's really sweet and user-friendly. My mother-in-law liked Patron Saint of Liars the best. She always says, 'When are you going to write another of these sweet books?' "