TASTE OF CHERRY
The New Yorker|August 07, 2023
Ann Patchett's pandemic novel
KATY WALDMAN
TASTE OF CHERRY

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.

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.

THE NEW YORKER DERGISINDEN DAHA FAZLA HIKAYETümünü görüntüle
ART OF STONE
The New Yorker

ART OF STONE

\"The Brutalist.\"

time-read
6 dak  |
December 30, 2024 - January 6, 2025
MOMMA MIA
The New Yorker

MOMMA MIA

Audra McDonald triumphs in \"Gypsy\" on Broadway.

time-read
5 dak  |
December 30, 2024 - January 6, 2025
INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
The New Yorker

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

\"Black Doves,\" on Netflix.

time-read
5 dak  |
December 30, 2024 - January 6, 2025
NATURE STUDIES
The New Yorker

NATURE STUDIES

Kyle Abraham's “Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful.”

time-read
5 dak  |
December 30, 2024 - January 6, 2025
WHAT GOOD IS MORALITY?
The New Yorker

WHAT GOOD IS MORALITY?

Ask not just where it came from but what it does for us

time-read
10+ dak  |
December 30, 2024 - January 6, 2025
THE SPOTIFY SYNDROME
The New Yorker

THE SPOTIFY SYNDROME

What is the world's largest music-streaming platform really costing us?

time-read
10+ dak  |
December 30, 2024 - January 6, 2025
THE LEPER - LEE CHANGDONG
The New Yorker

THE LEPER - LEE CHANGDONG

. . . to survive, to hang on, waiting for the new world to dawn, what can you do but become a leper nobody in the world would deign to touch? - From \"Windy Evening,\" by Kim Seong-dong.

time-read
10+ dak  |
December 30, 2024 - January 6, 2025
YOU WON'T GET FREE OF IT
The New Yorker

YOU WON'T GET FREE OF IT

Alice Munro's partner sexually abused her daughter. The harm ran through the work and the family.

time-read
10+ dak  |
December 30, 2024 - January 6, 2025
TALK SENSE
The New Yorker

TALK SENSE

How much sway does our language have over our thinking?

time-read
10+ dak  |
December 30, 2024 - January 6, 2025
TO THE DETECTIVE INVESTIGATING MY MURDER
The New Yorker

TO THE DETECTIVE INVESTIGATING MY MURDER

Dear Detective, I'm not dead, but a lot of people can't stand me. What I mean is that breathing is not an activity they want me to keep doing. What I mean is, they want to knock me off. My days are numbered.

time-read
3 dak  |
December 30, 2024 - January 6, 2025