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