The art of the novel | Ann Patchett

**Elise Hu** (0:03)
You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu.
If you're a big reader, the kind of person who always has a book going, a stack on the nightstand, a couple more waiting in your bag, author Ann Patchett would like you to know you're doing something more important than you might think.

**Ann Patchett** (0:24)
Reading and the telling of stories is how we as mammals communicate. This is what the human animal does. We shape our experience into stories.

**Elise Hu** (0:38)
Ann is the author of 10 novels, among them Bel Canto, Commonwealth, and her latest called Whistler. For the past 15 years, she's also been the owner of Parnassus Books, one of the most beloved independent bookstores in the US.
Some of you may remember Ann from earlier this year, when we shared her recent TED Talk, which was a love letter to reading, and our Beyond the Talk conversation came with it. Ann came back to sit down with me for a full TED Talks Daily Book Club conversation. It was a wide-ranging hour about her new novel, The Craft of Writing, and why she's come to believe that a life lived around books is really a life lived in connection with and in service to other people. Ann, who's by her own cheerful admission and optimist, also shares what she does when the weight of the world starts to feel too heavy.

**Ann Patchett** (1:29)
It is important to fight against what you hate, and yet it is more important to fight for something that you love.

**Elise Hu** (1:41)
While books and The Craft of Writing might be the scaffolding for this conversation, ultimately it's about friendship, kindness, and the quiet case for paying closer attention to the people right in front of us. It's coming up right after a short break.
And now our conversation of the day. Welcome to the Book Club, Ann. So I'll just jump right in. You said in your recent TED Talk that books are the rock on which you built your church. So I'd love for you to talk with us about your faith in books, that seems so foundational to everything you do.

**Ann Patchett** (2:23)
I'm a reader and I've always been a far ranging and voracious reader, which I find the most interesting thing about that is if you are a huge reader, all you really know is how much you haven't read.
Constantly you're having conversations and I'm like, no, I've never heard of that book. I was at the bookstore this morning doing some videos with our team and they were recommending books. And I was like, where did you find that thing? I have never heard of that. So that's what's so great. No matter how much you read, no matter who you are, you're going to find more books to read and different ways to inform your life. And it's been such a joy for me to be a reader. I'm always trying to encourage other people to be a reader.

**Elise Hu** (3:12)
Yeah, I love how in so many of your interviews, including the one with me, you pepper them with book recommendations. And so I wanted to be just taking footnotes the entire time. Now to Whistler, and there could be some spoilers ahead. So we just want to warn you of that. I want to give the heads up in case anything comes up. But for those who are listening and watching, who haven't yet read the book, can you briefly introduce us to Whistler and its main characters?

**Ann Patchett** (3:41)
Sure. My elevator pitch. So Daphne Fuller is 53 years old. She's the narrator of the story, and she is spending the day in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City with her husband, Jonathan. Jonathan notices that someone has been following them and is looking at Daphne. And they try to give him the shake, but finally Jonathan goes to talk to this older man in his 70s, and it turns out it's Eddie Triplett, who was Daphne's stepfather for a little over a year, and she has not seen him since she was nine years old. And the story is about their relationship in the past, in the present, and in the future. The nice thing about when you've had a book out for a while, you get to a point where you know how to talk about it. The first two or three times someone asks that question, and I always think I have no idea what this book is about.
But then you really do, you figure it out on the fly.