When the author Ann Patchett was five years old, her family broke apart. Her mother divorced her father, married the man with whom she’d been having an affair, and moved Patchett and her sister from Los Angeles to Nashville. Patchett gained four new siblings and an additional parent. Years later, when she was twenty-seven, her mother remarried again. “I suffered from abundance,” she writes in “My Three Fathers,” a 2020 essay for this magazine. As a girl, she would fly back to L.A. for a week every summer to see her birth father. Often, they’d go to Forest Lawn cemetery. “We would bring a lunch and walk the paths through the exemplary grass to see where the movie stars were buried,” Patchett writes. She adds that the scent of carnations can still return her to “those happy afternoons.” The cemetery, crowded but lonely, gives off echoes of her unconventional ménage, and Patchett fashions it into a figure for family itself: a plot in which you’re trapped with a bunch of strangers, a place of mingled loss and togetherness.
Most of Patchett’s work is directly or indirectly about the experience of being stuck in a difficult family. She is a connoisseur of ambivalent interpersonal dynamics within closed groups. “Bel Canto” (2001), her breakout novel, traces the bonds that develop among terrorists and their prisoners. “State of Wonder” (2011) follows a scientist searching for her colleagues in the Amazon rain forest. In the Pulitzer finalist “The Dutch House” (2019), two grown siblings return compulsively to their unhappy childhood: “Like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns.”
Bu hikaye The New Yorker dergisinin August 07, 2023 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Giriş Yap
Bu hikaye The New Yorker dergisinin August 07, 2023 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Giriş Yap
TAKE TWO
\"The Hills of California\" and \"Yellow Face\" come to Broadway.
DOWNWARD SPIRALS
Missy Mazzoli's \"The Listeners\" and Jeanine Tesori's \"Grounded.\"
IT TAKES A VILLAGE
The exuberant, complicating drawings of the Shakers.
THE LONG CON
Rachel Kushner's anti-spy, anti-realism novel.
IF MEMORY SERVES
John Lewis knew how to put a legacy of heroism.
SILICON VALLEY'S INFLUENCE GAME
From crypto to A.I., tech titans are pouring money into super PACS to savage their political opponents.
WHEN THE ICE MELTS
What the fate of the Arctic means for the rest of the Earth.
SLEEP ESSENTIAL FOR HEALTH
To achieve good health, you must maintain a regular sleep schedule, and be able to get back to sleep once you are awake.
THE K-POP KING
Chairman Bang is bringing his formula for creating idols to the U.S.
THE SIGHTED WORLD
Growing up with the writer Ved Mehta.