Ann Patchett

Happy birthday to Nashville's favorite novelist and bookseller, who learned something important about perseverance after college... 

It’s the birthday of novelist Ann Patchett (books by this author), born in Los Angeles (1963). She went to a Catholic girls school in Nashville and published her first short story in The Paris Review when she was still an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College. Critics raved, and the story appeared in lots of anthologies. And then she got a bunch of rejection slips — and writer’s block.

She moved back in with her mom and got a job waiting tables at T.G.I. Friday’s in Nashville. She said that there were so many great things about those dark days waitressing there, like a deep sense of camaraderie — a place where, she said, “Everybody believed that they were special, that they weren’t really a waiter, that they were the one who was getting out. … I had to come to terms with the fact that I was just like everybody else, a girl with a dream and a plate of hot fajitas.”

At the end of her shifts, to keep herself awake while rolling silverware at two in the morning, she made up a story in her head, and kept adding to it during the course of a year. And then she sat down and wrote that story in six months, and it became her first published novel, The Patron Saint of Liars (1992).

Her fourth novel, Bel Canto (2001), published a decade later and inspired by the hostage crises in Peru, was enormously successful. It won the PEN/Faulkner award and sold more than a million copies. Since then, she’s written the memoir Truth & Beauty (2004), a collection of essays This is the Story of a Happy Marriage (2014), and most recently, a novel The Dutch House (2019), a dark fairy tale about two smart people who cannot overcome their past. WA