Ann Patchett was born on December 2, 1963, in Los Angeles, California, to Frank Patchett (a Los Angeles police captain who arrested Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan[8]) and Jeanne Ray (a nurse who later became a novelist).[9] She is the younger of two daughters. Her mother and father divorced when she was young. Her mother remarried, and when Patchett was six years old the family moved to Nashville, Tennessee.[10]
In 2010, she co-founded a bookstore with Karen Hayes, Parnassus Books, in Nashville, Tennessee, which opened in November 2011.[13] In 2016, Parnassus Books expanded, adding a bookmobile to expand the reach of the bookstore in Nashville.[14]
Patchett lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband, Karl VanDevender.[15] It is Patchett’s second marriage.[16]
For nine years, Patchett worked at Seventeen magazine,[3] where she wrote primarily non-fiction and the magazine published one of every five articles she wrote. She ended her relationship with the magazine after getting into a dispute with an editor and exclaiming, "I’ll never darken your door again!"[3]
A friend of writer Lucy Grealy, Patchett has written a memoir about their relationship, Truth & Beauty: A Friendship. Patchett's novel, Run,[5] was released in October 2007. What now?, published in April 2008, is an essay based on a commencement speech she delivered at her alma mater in 2006.
Patchett is the editor of the 2006 volume of the anthology series The Best American Short Stories.[20] In 2011, she published State of Wonder, a novel set in the Amazon jungle, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize.[2][21] In 2016 she published her novel Commonwealth to widespread critical acclaim. Patchett called the book her "autobiographical first novel," explaining, “The wonderful thing about publishing this book at 52 is that I know that I am [already] capable of working from a place of deep imagination.”[22]
In November 2021, she published These Precious Days, an essay collection she describes as the sequel to This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. These Precious Days received wide acclaim, with review aggregator Book Marks rating it a “rave” based on 25 reviews.[26] In 2023, Ann Patchett published a novel called Tom Lake, and it was ranked a The New York Times Best Sellers.[27]
In 2024, in an interview for the BBC, when asked her thoughts on encouraging people to slow down and sit with issues longer, she responded:[28]
Wouldn't it be lovely if people sat quietly for longer periods of time? And I do, because I write novels for a living. And I'm very, very careful with myself because I don't want anything to disrupt my ability to concentrate on one thing for long periods of time. To that end, I do not watch television under any circumstances, I do not have a cell phone, and I participate in no form of social media. I have never looked at Facebook. That's kind of interesting, because my bookstore has a huge social media presence and I make videos about the books that I'm reading, but I never watch them.
Her work has been translated into more than 30 languages.[29]
— (1994). Taft. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN9780395694619. Retrieved 14 September 2016. Reprinted in the following year, see Taft. New York, NY: Random House. 1995. ISBN0804113882. Retrieved 14 September 2016.
^Giles, Wanda H.; Bonner, J. H. (2009). Twenty-First-Century American Novelists: Second Series. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 350. Detroit: Gale Cengage Learning. ISBN9780787681685 – via Literature Resource Center. Ann Patchett
^ abPatchett, Ann. "About Ann"(autobiography). annpatchett.com. Retrieved 14 September 2016.
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