The craft of storytelling with Ann Patchett

**Ann Patchett** (0:00)
I think every book is a gateway drug. If you can get people to read, and you get them comfortable in a bookstore, then they're going to read other books. If you read nothing, you're always going to read nothing.

**Adam Grant** (0:15)
Hey, everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to ReThinking, my podcast with TED on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.
Ann Patchett is a best-selling author and award-winning novelist. Along with acclaimed non-fiction works, Ann has written 10 novels, including The Dutch House, Tom Lake, and Bel Canto. But Ann's relationship with literature goes far beyond the page. In case you haven't seen her passionate videos online advocating for indie bookstores, you should know that she actually owns one in Nashville, Tennessee, called Parnassus Books, which she opened with a partner in 2011
Before that, Nashville hardly had any indie bookstores.

**Ann Patchett** (1:01)
For me, it felt like a civic duty. I don't want to live in a city that doesn't have a bookstore.
Therefore, I guess I am the person who is going to open a bookstore.

**Adam Grant** (1:14)
Ann is a firm believer in the power of stories, and she's one of the most powerful storytellers of our time. Her fiction is so emotionally honest that people have been asking if her latest novel, Whistler, is autobiographical. Whistler is a moving book about the enduring love of two people who have been separated for decades. I ended up reading it about three times slower than I normally read, just to savor each line. I'm always curious about how authors draw inspiration from their own lives. So I wanted to start at the beginning with Ann.
I have to start by asking you about your upbringing, because not many of us grow up with a father who was a police captain arresting serial killers. And I have to know what that was like and how it shaped who you are.

**Ann Patchett** (2:01)
Well, my father had just about every job in the LAPD.
He was involved in some high-profile cases, but I don't think those cases defined his career.
He was one of the first people to interview Manson before they brought him in. And he also was the guy who picked up Sirhan the night he shot Bobby Kennedy and drove him in. That didn't affect my life, I will say, because I was a kid. And those were names, and that's what my father did. But I was very young. And my father wasn't somebody who sat around and talked about murderers either. He would not have been interested in that at all.

**Adam Grant** (2:46)
That actually maybe answers the next question I was going to ask you, which is, it's so clear throughout both your work, your writing and the reputation you have, that you see the goodness in people. And I often worry that when kids are raised in an environment where you're just acutely aware of the fact that there are bad people in the world, does that skew your worldview? And it sounds like you were shielded from that.

**Ann Patchett** (3:12)
Well, my parents got divorced when I was four or five. And my mother moved me and my sister from Los Angeles to Tennessee. So it didn't grow up with my father. I saw my father a week a year, which was a great sadness.
The two things that have gotten cheaper over the course of my lifetime, plane travel and long-distance phone calls, which are now free, but were huge defining deal when I was growing up. So it wasn't like my father was coming home at night with blood on his hands. I didn't live in that world. We loved to go to the police academy when we went out to visit, but I just thought of my father as a very popular guy. Everybody came over to the table to pay their respects. I had an uncle who was a career firefighter in Los Angeles and another uncle who was a prosecutor in the DA's office.
So we were a very civil servant family.

**Adam Grant** (4:12)
Okay, let's talk about your mother. She was a nurse before becoming a novelist, which is also my wife Allison's trajectory.

**Ann Patchett** (4:21)
My mother was 60 She wanted to retire. She didn't have enough money. And I kept saying, write a book, write a book, write a book. I'll help you.
I made her do it because I saw it as the best road to retirement. And she was somebody who used to write and I think wanted to be a writer when she was young, didn't have the self-confidence. But by the time I was a writer and I was, you know, moderately successful, I could really set a course for her and push her through.