I am a glass-half-full, can-do kind of gal. It’s just the salt in my brain.

“I’m a bookseller. That’s what I do,” she says, when I remind her we are supposed to be discussing her own new novel, Tom Lake. “I’m obsessed with other people’s books.”

To say that Patchett is evangelical about books is no mere cliche. In one of her essays, she compares her zeal to that of a Hare Krishna devotee she met many years ago who spent every day proclaiming his love of God to strangers in Chicago airport. “I would stand in an airport to tell people how much I love books, reading them, writing them, making sure other people felt comfortable reading and writing them.” …

With her focus on love and marriage, and some sort of redemption however serious the subject matter, she is at odds in today’s climate of angsty millennial fiction. “I am a glass-half-full, can-do kind of gal. It’s just the salt in my brain,” she admits cheerfully. “So, people give me grief about being too hopeful or too cheerful or too interested in family – it doesn’t matter. I’m not writing all the novels…

Patchett has been obsessed with Our Town – “the greatest American play ever written”, according to Edward Albee – since she first read it in high school. “It’s about how gorgeous and ordinary life is. And that’s sort of my thing,” she says. “Life is unbelievably beautiful, and very plain, and everything seems slow. And then very, very fast. And the play encapsulates that.” Its message also chimes with Buddhist teachings of impermanence, which these days live alongside Patchett’s “old-school Catholic sensibility”. “I try,” she says simply…

In Tom Lake she set out to recreate this sense that “in a world and a planet that is going to hell, there is still so much beauty and so much joy,” she explains. With the cherry trees in full bloom, Lara feels lockdown guilt at her happiness in having all her loved ones back home. “I can do nothing about the world and the flames beyond leaving free masks in the fruit stand, but the part in which we are trapped is joy itself,” she reflects.

But the flames are not just those of a global pandemic. Lara’s eldest daughter Emily, who plans to make her life on the farm, decides she is not going to have children because of the climate emergency. It is here that even Patchett’s optimism falters. “I can’t imagine going through this with young children. You’re not worrying just for yourself and your own life and a love for trees and birds and all that. You’re worrying about it for the people you love the most.” …

Few things irritate her more than writers who complain that writing is the hardest job in the world. “I always want to say, ‘Get a job!’” While you wouldn’t expect her to have a Hemingway-style routine, it’s a surprise that she cites Madonna as a role model. She recalls an interview in which the singer said she never does anything to hurt herself. “And that’s very true for me. I don’t make myself feel guilty. I go to sleep at pretty much the same time. I exercise every night. I make time for my friends. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke.”

Does she ever worry about the maxim that happiness writes white? That her work is just too nice? Tom Lake isn’t an entirely happy novel, she counters. “It’s about climate change. It’s about a really troubling young relationship. There’s plenty of balance in it. But again, I’m just one voice in so many beautiful, disparate, important, vital voices.” And while she doesn’t write with a reader in mind, she knows what she wants to read. “If the world is kicking me in the teeth, in terms of the news and all the things we have to worry about, that’s not what I want in my novel. I don’t need to be lifted up. But I would like the kindness of humanity that surrounds me to have a moment,” she says. “There I am. That’s what I do.”

—  Lisa Allardice, from ‘In a world that is going to hell, there is still so much joy’: Ann Patchett on finding happiness (The Guardian, July 22, 2023)