In March, Ann Patchett had only just started doing interviews for her new novel, “Whistler,” but she was already willing to nudge the conversation elsewhere: to other books, to our dogs, to growing up in Southern California.
“I’m from Glendale,” she says, after learning her interviewer is calling from Pasadena. “My father was LAPD, and my favorite uncle was Los Angeles Fire. I had another uncle who was in the DA’s office. I come from a long line of L.A. civil servants.”
This yields a delightfully unexpected connection: Both of our fathers had spent time in and around the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office in the ’60s and ’70s.
“I wonder if [your father] would have crossed paths with my dad,” says Patchett. “My stepmother worked in the DA’s office, and by the time she retired, she was running it.”
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If you’ve read Patchett’s work or seen the weekly social media posts from her bookstore, Parnassus Books, her warmth and ability to connect with others aren’t surprising. She’s a skilled interviewer and a winning interviewee, and in her novels, Patchett creates realistic relationships that are as compelling as cutting the red wire — no, wait, the blue! — in a spy thriller.
“Whistler,” her new novel, is now in stores, and her contemporaries are praising it. National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louise Erdrich told us earlier this year, “That book, it’s one that I’m going to read over and over. I love it so much,” she said. “This just danced right on my heart.”
Ruta Sepetys, author of the just-published “A Fortune of Sand,” celebrated Patchett’s generosity and authenticity as both a person and a writer via email. “She’s a literacy advocate, bookseller, and a champion of fellow writers. Her books capture the unique complexity of human relationships in a way that’s intimate yet expansive,” says Sepetys. “I love all of her work, but her latest book, ‘Whistler,’ is my favorite.”
Patchett discussed the book via the landline at her Nashville home. Her dog, Nemo VanDevender – a lively rescue who’s so calm on camera she says he looks like a “drugged sock puppet” – occasionally chimed in.
Cell preservation
The new novel opens as Daphne, a teacher in her 50s visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, runs into 76-year-old Eddie, the man who’d been her beloved stepfather during his brief marriage to Daphne’s mother. They haven’t seen each other in decades, and the story of what happened quickly pulls you in.
Patchett, as readers of her novels “Bel Canto,” “Tom Lake” and “The Dutch House,” as well as her nonfiction such as “Truth & Beauty” and “These Precious Days” already know, is a world-class noticer, observing and writing about subtle gestures and brief moments that reveal the inner lives of her characters, who by and large are decent, well-meaning people you come to care about very much.
That’s true throughout “Whistler.” There are moments, such as the unselfconscious way two grown sisters comfortably entwine on a couch or how a spouse can decode a partner’s actions, where you get a sense of how closely Patchett pays attention to the world around her.
“I think it goes back to not having a phone. I think I look at the world in ways that a lot of people don’t,” she says of her smartphone-free life, sharing a story of the time her husband Karl found himself alone without his cellphone. “He went to breakfast, and he said every single person in the restaurant, including the waiters, was looking at their phones. I said, ‘Welcome to my world.’
“It’s like I am spending my life in a zombie movie in which I am the only person who isn’t a member of the undead,” she says. “If you want to notice details, don’t hold something in front of your eyes.”
That said, “The Laydown Diaries” and “New to You” videos she records for Parnassus, where she recommends books and interviews authors, are extremely popular with cellphone users interested in both her reading material and clothing and style choices.
So, what’s it like to be a book influencer?
“I’m really glad you asked because I have never been on social media, ever,” says Patchett, who credits Parnassus’ social media guru Sarah Arnold for the video successes. “If I’ve done a good job getting dressed in the morning, Sarah will reach down the back of my neck and flip the tag over. She’s like, ‘I just need to know [the label], because I’m going to spend the whole day answering DMs about your dress.’”
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Patchett, despite not being perpetually online, sees the value of having a platform and using it for good.
“The main thing is, we’re promoting books. I can’t even say ‘selling books’ because I hope that when people see the books that I hold up, they go to their local bookstore and buy the books,” she says.
And despite her initial reticence about referencing politics – some viewers complained when she once wore a Joe Biden T-shirt – that changed when she started speaking out about ICE’s actions in Minneapolis or the administration’s clashes with Canada.
“I’ve had so many notes from people in Minneapolis, like postcards to the bookstore, from people who say thank you so much for shouting us out and for standing by us,” says Patchett, who also wrote back to her Canadian customers to feel free to get her recommended reads locally. “Check the website, you will see exactly what I’m picking every month, and you can buy it in Canada.”
Love and kindness
“Whistler” is also a story about what we know and what we don’t about the people we love.
Patchett says Eddie, the longtime book editor character, is inspired by her late friend, Jim Fox, to whom she dedicated the book. “Jim Fox was legal counsel for HarperCollins, and we became friends in 2003,” says Patchett. “He was one of the best friends I ever had in my life.”
After Fox died, Patchett wrote about him in a 2025 New Yorker piece, “Glowworms.” “I realized I could write him,” says Patchett. “It made me so happy to be with him in that way. I thought, I’m going to write this story, and it’s not about Jim, and it’s not about me, but it is about our love. … I can take all of the love that he had for me, and all of the love that I had for him, and put it in this book.”
So the character was not based on the late Simon & Schuster, Knopf and New Yorker editor Robert Gottlieb, as some have speculated? “It’s not,” she says. “But I love the idea that people will be reading the book and thinking, Was it Robert Gottlieb? Was it Farrar, Straus … or Giroux? Was it Carly Simon’s father [Richard L. Simon, the co-founder of Simon & Schuster]?”
Like Patchett, the book is funny, and she says people she meets are often surprised by her humor.
“I think my books are very funny, and for the most part, people don’t think they’re funny because they are also moving,” she says. “I think ‘Whistler’ is a make-you-laugh, make-you-cry kind of book, but people walk away with the feeling, ‘It made me cry’ – even if it did make them laugh.”
The novel, which explores how Daphne and Eddie’s reconnection reverberates through the lives of siblings, parents, friends and family, is a book about human decency and kindness. Why now?
“Why now?” she says, laughing. “I mean, my whole body of work is about love and kindness; that’s just the place where I live. That’s my brain chemistry, and I’m very fortunate for that.“But I do think that in this angry and divided world, what I see every day in my life – in the grocery store, on the street when I’m walking the dog, when I’m out – I see so much kindness,” she says, fully acknowledging that being a well-known writer makes it easier for her. “And yet it’s what I see constantly.”
Pony expressions
The cover of Patchett’s new novel features a painting of a horse by the Nashville-based artist Noah Saterstrom, but she cautions that “Whistler” isn’t a horse book.
“There are people who love horse books, and there are people who hate horse books, and so having a horse on the cover can be sort of a polarizing thing,” says Patchett about the image, whose significance is revealed when you read the novel. “I want to manage expectations.”
While many authors don’t have as much say over their covers, Patchett explained that she commissioned hers and turned it in with the manuscript. “I’m like, “OK, here’s the novel and here’s the cover: Have fun.”
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Working with Saterstrom, who is currently collaborating on a book with Patchett’s friend, the author Kate DiCamillo, is a dream, she says.
“When we did ‘The Dutch House,’ I said, ‘I want a picture of a 12-year-old girl in a red coat with black hair and blue eyes. She’s looking directly at the artist, and she loves the person who’s painting her. And he’s like, ‘Got it, OK,’” she recalls. “Three days later, he gave me the painting.”
This time, there was some horse wrangling. She was of the opinion that the creature should be looking straight on at the reader.
“Noah said, ‘But their eyes are on the side, the horse can’t look straight at you,’” recalls Patchett, laughing. “I was like, ‘Figure it out.’”
After negotiating over the size of the saddle (bigger), the elevation of the mountains (smaller), and the location of the horse’s backside (behind), Patchett says they had a winner.
“When it’s all done, I take a picture of it, and I send it to my editor. I’m like, ‘See, it comes with a picture,’” she says, praising Saterstrom’s skill, speed and unflappable calm. “I love that painting.”
A bookstore like ‘Cheers’
While best known for her fiction, Patchett’s nonfiction is also stellar, and it sometimes contains details that end up in her fiction, such as Daphne’s trio of dads – her biological father and two stepfathers – who are characters in “Whistler.”
“Having three fathers, yeah. That would be a big one,” says Patchett, who wrote about her own abundance of dads in an essay included in “These Precious Days.” “There was a time in my life when I was so careful not to repeat myself … and then I thought, ‘Oh, the hell with it.’”
She’s not actually repeating herself, but a detail she might have encountered in nonfiction might get recontextualized into her fiction.
“It’s something I gave a lot of thought to,” she says, and DiCamillo told her that it’s OK to revisit a fertile area of interest. “Oh, the freedom in that,” says Patchett.
As she did praising DiCamillo, Patchett redirected attention away from herself to others throughout our conversation. She praises books by Erdrich, Emily St. John Mandel and Douglas Stuart, as well as the art of Saterstrom and Robin Preiss Glasser, with whom she also collaborates. Patchett shouts out fellow authors in the novel, including George Saunders, Paul Murray and Kieran Desai. Patchett even politely requests that this piece mention the Substack of Ron Charles, the new venture from the former Washington Post book critic, who was cut loose along with the entire book section team earlier this year. “It’s great,” she says.
And she good-naturedly describes what it was like to find herself as a character in someone else’s novel, “The Correspondent,” Virginia Evans’ breakout hit, in which the character “Ann Patchett” exchanges letters with the narrator. The book’s success has resulted in a deluge of letters to the Actual Ann Patchett.
“I’m so happy for her, and her whole story is such a magic unicorn that never happens,” says Patchett, though she admits she could do without the volume of correspondence she’s gotten about the book. “Maybe you want to write to Virginia?”
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Finally, as we wind up the hour-plus conversation, Patchett returns to the idea of being a bookseller, and she shares her highest praise for her colleagues at the bookstore, who have provided her something she’d never had in her long career as a novelist: Coworkers.
“I always feel like this is the wrong answer, but it is the true answer. The thing that I love about that bookstore is the people who work there, because I don’t have work colleagues,” she says.
“We are so embroiled in each other’s lives and love each other and do things for each other and do things together and celebrate and grieve and read and do everything together,” she says. “It’s like the bar in ‘Cheers.’ I’m not there all day, but I can step into that river of life of all these people that I love,”
“That’s what I love about the bookstore.”