Ann Patchett

Summary

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Wild Card with Rachel Martin – Ann Patchett

Date: December 25, 2025
Host: Rachel Martin (NPR)
Guest: Ann Patchett (Author)

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Episode Overview

In this intimate and thought-provoking episode of Wild Card, acclaimed novelist Ann Patchett sits down with Rachel Martin to answer deep, unexpected questions chosen at random from a deck of cards. Eschewing small talk, the conversation dives into formative childhood memories, the intricacies of love and acceptance, wrestling with faith and identity, the courage to critique one’s own work, and the meaning—or irrelevance—of legacy. Patchett’s candor, warmth, and wry humor shape a conversation full of memorable moments and honest insights into the writer’s mind and heart.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Growing Up on a Farm: Childhood, Solitude, and Selling Moss

[02:44–04:49]

• Patchett’s rural childhood: Ann describes living on a quirky, animal-filled non-working farm near Nashville. The unconventional menagerie included her own pig (a gift inspired by Charlotte’s Web) and chickens named after Nixon’s cabinet members.
  • “It was just a very animal-laden, isolated life. And because I'm an introvert, that worked out fine for me.” — Ann [03:31]
• Entrepreneurial spirit: At age 10, Ann created a moss business, collecting and selling moss to local florists, making “a lot more money off of moss than you do lemonade.” [04:17]
• Memorable advice: Her mother’s warning—“Remember, the rattlesnakes are blind when they're molting...they can't see you, so they're more likely to strike”—epitomizes the offbeat wisdom of her upbringing. [04:10]

Parental Influence: The Love of Books

[05:13–06:24]

• Modeling reading: Patchett credits all four of her parents (mother, father, stepmother, stepfather) for instilling in her a love of books, not through reading aloud but by example.
  • “I have later found out that that is actually more important than reading to children, that children see adults reading and engaged in relationships with books.” — Ann [05:24]
• First Book Love: Unsurprisingly, her favorite childhood book was Charlotte’s Web, leading not only to her beloved pig but also a lasting love of storytelling. [06:08–06:09]

Learning to Be Alone, Finding Contentment in Solitude

[07:00–11:29]

• Rachel shares how she learned to be alone while living in Japan after college, evolving from loneliness into a craving for solitude as a parent. [07:32–08:44]
• Ann’s perspective: She never wanted children, sensing early that she thrived in quiet. She recounts a formative Christmas spent alone house-sitting during graduate school, where knitting, books, and solitude brought genuine joy.
  • “That was a very, very joyful alone.” — Ann [11:14]

Annotating Bel Canto: Honesty, Critique, and Vulnerability

[13:13–17:41]

• Why annotate? Revisiting her most acclaimed novel, Patchett published an annotated edition filled with candid marginalia—critiques and praise for her younger self’s writing:
  • “Bel Canto is so far away that I could say, look at this hard thing that I did. I did this really well. Look at this easy thing that I did. I did this really poorly.” — Ann [13:52]
• Self-vulnerability: She muses on public versus private vulnerability and jokes about the absurdity of rewriting the book as “Bel Canto Taylor’s Version.”
  • “What if I just open up a new file and rewrite it? What if I just do it right?... But then people would always say, oh, no, it was better before.” — Ann [17:09–17:19]

Comfort with Being Wrong

[17:46–18:59]

• Ann’s philosophy: She welcomes being wrong, especially about “big things” like climate change or the world’s problems:
  • “There’s so many things you want to be wrong about. I want to be wrong about climate change. I want to be wrong about the state of our nation... I hope to be wrong.” — Ann [18:05]
• Practical wrongness: With a self-deprecating joke: “I have a terrible sense of direction. So at least five times a day, I am wrong.” [18:38]

Expressions of Love & the Influence of Greg Boyle

[19:23–22:43]

• Striving for acceptance: Ann wants to express love as her husband does, with “complete blanket acceptance.”
  • “I work very hard to not fix and to just see the people in my life and accept them for who they are and love them for who they are.” — Ann [19:31]
• Greg Boyle’s philosophy: She’s inspired by the Jesuit priest’s radical acceptance:
  • “Everyone is perfect the way they are, everyone is beloved, everyone is accepted, no matter what.” — Ann [20:43]
• Dedication anecdotes: She shares a publishing near-miss—rescinding a book dedication to an ex before it went to print, and later, dedicating Bel Canto to her now-husband even before they married, trusting the relationship implicitly. [21:37–22:58]

Faith, Catholicism, and the Mystery of God

[25:07–30:43]

• Rachel’s and Ann’s spiritual evolution: The women discuss their shifting relationships with faith, belief, and religious identity.
• Ann on God: Profound humility underscores Ann’s approach:
  • “I still believe in God. And here's the thing. If I tried to tell you what that meant, I would be wrong. The only thing I know for sure is that whatever I know is wrong.” — Ann [25:12 & 28:02]
  • “It seems very possible to me that being alive is God, and...the trick is whether or not we know it.” — Ann [26:15]
• Catholic identity despite dissonance: Ann sees herself as Catholic much like she remains Tennessean or American—claiming the label while acknowledging disagreement and discomfort:
  • “I am still a Catholic, and there is an enormous amount about Catholicism that I don't believe and am appalled by. I am still an American, and there is an enormous amount about being an American that I don't believe in and that I am appalled by. I am a Tennessean…” — Ann [28:33]
• Advice on religion: She recalls a formative conversation with a teacher who told her:
  • “Don’t waste your time picking out your luggage. Just go on the trip.” — Ann [29:10]

Legacy and Letting Go

[30:47–32:13]

• No concern for legacy: Ann is nonchalant about her posthumous impact:
  • “No.” — Ann, on whether she worries about legacy [30:50]
  • “Don’t humor yourself into thinking that you have control over things over which you have no control.” — Ann [31:14]
• Wry practicality about estate planning: A lawyer’s hypothetical about someone else inheriting her royalties is met with a laugh: “I'm dead. Why do I care?” [31:14]

Time Machine: A Moment to Linger In

[32:42–35:03]

• Lingering with the moss: After some gentle deliberation, Ann chooses her farm childhood, sitting in the woods with her moss and animals, as her moment to revisit and savor:
  • “Those moments of nature and complete silence, those moments before anything called me away to do something else...that sense of time when no one’s going to call you until it’s dark.” [33:40]
  • “It’s a real Charlotte’s Web kind of world. A girl and her pig out in the countryside.” [34:40]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On childhood entrepreneurship:
  • “You make a lot more money off of moss than you do lemonade, Rachel.” — Ann [04:17]
• On the fallibility of human knowledge:
  • “If I tried to tell you what that meant, I would be wrong. The only thing that I know for sure is that whatever I know is wrong.” — Ann [25:12]
• On legacy:
  • “Don’t humor yourself into thinking that you have control over things over which you have no control.” — Ann [31:14]
• On loving acceptance:
  • “All I need to do is not say to my husband, maybe you want to wear a coat? It’s a little cold.” — Ann [21:10]
• On faith and labels:
  • “I am still a Catholic, and there is an enormous amount about Catholicism that I don't believe and am appalled by. I am still an American...I am a Tennessean...But I am those things.” — Ann [28:33]
• On what matters most:
  • “What matters is that we do our best with the life that we have, that we show up, that we love each other, and that we try to be as aware as is humanly possible of the life and the gift that we're given.” — Ann [30:15]
• On the purpose of religion:
  • “Don’t waste your time picking out your luggage. Just go on the trip.” — Ann’s teacher, relayed by Ann [29:10]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:44] – Ann’s childhood farm and the moss business
• [05:13] – Parental modeling of loving books
• [07:00] – Discussion of solitude and how both women learned to be alone
• [13:13] – Why Ann annotated Bel Canto
• [17:46] – On comfort with being wrong
• [19:23] – Expressions of love and Greg Boyle’s philosophy
• [21:37] – The wild dedication stories
• [25:07] – How Ann’s feelings about God have evolved
• [28:33] – Catholic identity and the meaning of belonging
• [30:47] – The irrelevance of legacy
• [32:42] – “Time machine” closing: A moment to linger in childhood woods

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Tone & Style

The conversation is marked by Ann’s thoughtful, wry, and vulnerable storytelling, with Rachel’s empathetic interviewing drawing out self-reflection and philosophical musings. The playful card structure ensures surprising, honest responses, while Ann’s humility, openness to being wrong, and love of solitude provide a rich portrait not just of an accomplished writer, but of a wise and deeply human person.

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For listeners seeking more than a standard author interview, this episode offers refreshing candor, philosophical insight, and one of the more memorable discussions about faith, self-acceptance, and letting go of control. It’s a reminder, as the best Wild Card episodes are, that our humanity is shaped as much by our questions as our answers.

Transcript

[Sponsor/Announcer]

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the University of Kansas health system, where even the smallest acts transform lives. Every moment, every life, uplifted makes them who they are. Learn [e-mail] hey, it's Rachel.

[Rachael Martin]

Wishing each and every one of you a very happy holiday season. I wanted to reshare one of my very favorite conversations. It's with the writer Ann Patchett. Hope you enjoy. How have your feelings about God changed over time?

[Ann Patchett]

I still believe in God.

[Rachael Martin]

Do you?

[Ann Patchett]

And here's the thing. If I tried to tell you what that meant, I would be wrong. The only thing that I know for sure is that whatever I know is wrong.

[Rachael Martin]

I'm Rachael Martin, and this is Wildcard, the game where cards control the conversation. Each week, my guest answers questions about their life, questions pulled from a deck of cards. They're allowed to skip one question and to flip one back on me. My guest this week is author Ann Patchett.

[Ann Patchett]

What matters is that we do our best with the life that we have, that we show up, that we love each other, and that we try to be as aware as is humanly possible of the life and the gift that we're given.

[Rachael Martin]

Anne is a hugely popular writer. She was a Pulitzer finalist for her book the Dutch House. Her most recent novel is called Tom Lake. But she's probably most well known for her 2001 book, Bel Canto. It tells the story of a group of strangers taken hostage somewhere in Latin America. It is lyrical and heartbreaking, and it's been adapted into an opera and a movie. Overall, it's been a massively successful book, and Anne recently decided to do a fascinating thing. She published an annotated version of Bel Canto with her own handwritten notes. In the margins, she calls out clunky turns of phrase, confusing plot points, repetitive language. She also gives herself some credit for good writing and thoughtful observations about the human condition. But mainly, she is owning her shortcomings, which feels like a bold quality we could use some more of. So with that, here's today's episode with Ryder Ann Patchett. Hi.

[Ann Patchett]

Hi.

[Rachael Martin]

I'm so glad you're here.

[Ann Patchett]

I'm really glad to be here.

[Rachael Martin]

You ready?

[Ann Patchett]

I'm ready.

[Rachael Martin]

Let's go. First, three cards. Holding them up now. One, two or three?

[Ann Patchett]

Three.

[Rachael Martin]

Okay. What's a place that shaped you as much as any person did?

[Ann Patchett]

When I was a child, we lived on a farm for several years. It was in Ashland City, about 30 minutes outside of Nashville. It was not a working farm. It Was just a collection of absolute weirdness. My sister had a.

[Rachael Martin]

That kind of farm.

[Ann Patchett]

No, that kind of farm. Anyway, we had a couple of horses. We had a rabbit. We had chickens, which were all named after members of Nixon's cabinet. We had dogs, which meant that dogs would just go through and they would stay for a couple of years. Same with the cats. It was real country life. And most importantly, I had a pig, which I got for my ninth birthday because I was obsessed with Charlotte's Web. It was just a very animal laden, isolated life. And because I'm an introvert, that worked out fine for me. And childhood was you would go outside and climb up a hill. I collected moss. Lots of flowers. I actually had a moss business. I sold moss in town when I was about 10 to florists.

[Rachael Martin]

Other kids are like selling lemonade. And little Ann Patchett is like some moss.

[Ann Patchett]

I'm in the moss trade. You make a lot more money off of moss than you do lemonade, Rachel. And I remember my mother saying things like, remember, remember, the rattlesnakes are blind when they're molting. So if you get into the BlackBerry bushes where the rattlesnakes go to shed their skins because they have those little tiny thorns on the BlackBerry bushes, just be aware because they can't see you, so they're more likely to strike. That was the bedrock advice of my childhood.

[Rachael Martin]

Wow, that didn't see that one coming in so many ways. In so many ways.

[Ann Patchett]

I didn't.

[Rachael Martin]

That was a very generative question.

[Ann Patchett]

Question.

[Rachael Martin]

Okay, three more cards.

[Ann Patchett]

Three. I like three. One, two, three.

[Rachael Martin]

Okay, three. Oh, this is sort of related. What's something your parents taught you to love?

[Ann Patchett]

Books. Did they? They did. My mother and my stepfather and my father and my stepmother and my father and my stepmother lived in California. They were all very big readers. And they didn't read to the kids, but they read themselves. And I have later found out that that is actually more important than reading to children, that children see adults reading and engaged in relationships with books. If my mother was reading a book, if my father was reading a book. And in the same way you wouldn't walk in a room and interrupt a conversation between adults. You would. You wouldn't interrupt an adult who was reading. And so I just had that modeled for me. That reading was a very important activity.

[Rachael Martin]

Do you remember the first book you fell in love with?

[Ann Patchett]

Like Charlotte's Web.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Oh, Charlotte.

[Ann Patchett]

Charlotte's Web. And I got a pig. And it's so funny because I'll say that. And other people are Like, I begged my parents for a pig, all I wanted was a pig. And I think, well, God, I was lucky. I'm the one who got a pig.

[Rachael Martin]

But now I'm like, did you also replicate the Nixon's cabinet? Like, what was it like? What's that guy's name? Gordon.

[Ann Patchett]

G. Gordon Liddy.

[Rachael Martin]

G. Gordon Liddy.

[Ann Patchett]

So here's the thing. The dogs who were passing through in giant packs would eat the chickens. They would just pick em off. And so one day we would go out and we would say, oh, gee, Gordon Liddy's gone. Three more.

[Rachael Martin]

One, two or three?

[Ann Patchett]

Do you want to guess?

[Rachael Martin]

Are you going three? This is so interesting.

[Ann Patchett]

I'm three all the way. Here's the secret, Rachel. I don't know what's on any of those cards, and it doesn't make any difference in the world which one I pick.

[Rachael Martin]

You're so smart, Ann. You're so smart. At what point in your life were you the most comfortable being alone?

[Ann Patchett]

Okay, you answer that one first. Are you flipping that? That's. I'm. Flip that one.

[Rachael Martin]

Well.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Hmm.

[Rachael Martin]

It's not a neat and tidy answer. I learned how to be alone when I lived in Japan. I lived in Japan after college and I taught English and I lived in a very small town.

[Ann Patchett]

A bunch of.

[Rachael Martin]

Agriculture and a nuclear power plant. And that was the extent of the economy, not unlike my hometown where we also grew potatoes and had a nuclear power plant. So I was just lonely, you know, I was lonely. It's different than learning. Well, I guess I did learn how to be alone. I was lonely and that was a negative and got more comfortable with being in my own head. So I guess I learned how to be alone. And then when I became a parent, I craved being alone. I love my kids, you know, goes without saying. But I'm very, very comfortable being alone now. I know how to do it. I crave it.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

And.

[Rachael Martin]

It is not a sad experience in the least. I needed to restore myself, so maybe.

[Ann Patchett]

It'S now I don't have children. And one of the reasons that I have known since childhood that I wasn't going to have children is because it seemed quite clear to me that they didn't go away and you didn't get to be alone. And the things that I really have emotional problems with not being alone, noise and chaotic mess. And I just thought, oh, that's not for me. So I'm really glad I flipped that because while you were talking, my head was just flooding full of happy, happy memories of being alone. And I could Keep you on forever. Tell me one When I was in graduate school at the University of Iowa, I went there right out of College. I was 21. My birthday is in December, so I would have been 22. This was my first year of the MFA program and I didn't go home for Christmas. When I was young, Christmas was really kind of awful. It was just always made me really sad and so we don't need to.

[Rachael Martin]

Spend a ton of time on it but because you're was so it was my family.

[Ann Patchett]

Everybody was sad. My stepfather's birthday was Christmas day. He used to lie under the Christmas tree and cry. Every year on Christmas day my father would call and cry because we weren't there. My stepfather's children would fly out from California. They were crying cause they'd had to leave their mother. It was a cluster. It was a dumpster fire. Anyway, so got it. This particular Christmas I decided that I was old enough to just say, you know, I'm gonna, I'm going to take a pass on this one. And the director of the program was a guy named Jack Leggett. And Jack Leggett asked me if I would house sit for him. And he had a beautiful huge old house and it was freezing cold. And I went and stayed in his house by myself. I knit a sweater, I banked the fires, I read his books and I was completely and totally happy and restored. That was a very, very joyful alone.

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[Ann Patchett]

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[Rachael Martin]

We're gonna pull out of the game for a minute because Bel Canto, hugely popular book that you wrote.

[Ann Patchett]

How many years? It came out in 2001, so I finished it in 2000. Right.

[Rachael Martin]

So I read that you decided to do an annotated version of Bel Canto after you did something similar with your recent book, Tom Lake. You did that for a charity auction. Yes, but going back and revisiting Bel Canto and then making notes about what you liked and didn't like and then putting it out into the world takes guts, I think. Did it feel courageous to you to do?

[Ann Patchett]

Not in the least.

[Rachael Martin]

Why did you want to do it?

[Ann Patchett]

So it just seemed like an interesting project. It also seemed that there was no downside, but it really became, I think, an interesting exercise in novel writing. Bel Canto is so far away that I could say, look at this hard thing that I did. I did this really well. Look at this easy thing that I did. I did this really poorly. Look, I'm stalling here. I can see myself stalling. Look, now it's getting faster and it's getting better. Why is everybody lying on the floor for the first hundred pages? What an incredibly bad idea. And yet it works. How in the world did I have the nerve to do that?

[Rachael Martin]

Yeah, those are some of my favorite moments, when you just, like, nail something and you're like, yeah, that was awesome. I'm so glad I wrote that.

[Ann Patchett]

And I would never say that about something that I had just written. I would never praise myself in present time, nor would I ever be critical like this to anyone else's work. I would never say to a student, to a friend in a review, you are a fool. Look at this horrible thing you've done. And yet of myself, 24 years ago, I'm happy to do that.

[Rachael Martin]

Well, yeah, you stand on a lot of success. I mean, it does make you vulnerable to go back and criticize your own stuff and unpack that. But you stand on so much other success, and you're at a certain point in your career where it affords you that luxury of distance and to be able to go back and examine these things.

[Ann Patchett]

Can I ask you a question? Yeah. Do you perceive the vulnerability as I am making myself vulnerable to myself? Yeah. Or I am making myself vulnerable publicly?

[Rachael Martin]

I guess both. I guess I was thinking more publicly because you open yourself up to more criticism. There were those people who read Bel Canto. And then they told you, you know, like, why did it end this way? And the ending's not great. And this and this and this.

[Ann Patchett]

The ending is great.

[Rachael Martin]

See, I love that you used this as an opportunity to be like, nope, haters gonna hate. But, no, it's great. But you are just so honest about things that didn't work. And I saw that as. Not every writer would do that.

[Ann Patchett]

Anne.

[Rachael Martin]

I don't think any writer would go back and do an autopsy of a book, especially that was so successful. Like, why create a wound where there was no injury?

[Ann Patchett]

I feel like it's a great opportunity, and what harm can come of it? One of the things that I really thought about while I was working on this, I got about halfway through, and I thought, what about Bel Canto Taylor's version?

[Rachael Martin]

Wait, that took me a second.

[Ann Patchett]

Right? Like, instead of marking up the mistakes.

[Rachael Martin]

That'S a cultural whiplash for me.

[Ann Patchett]

Okay, what if I just open up a new file and rewrite it? What if I just do it right?

[Rachael Martin]

Oh, my God. Are you going to do that?

[Ann Patchett]

No, no. It was one or the other. I mean, I can't do them both. Yeah, but I thought that would make people really mad. Right, right, right. It would be really fun to fix it, but then people would always say, oh, no, it was better before.

[Rachael Martin]

Okay, next round.

[Ann Patchett]

You want to just guess, Rachel, what I'm gonna do?

[Sponsor/Announcer]

Oh, my God.

[Rachael Martin]

Are we going three? The whole.

[Ann Patchett]

We're going three. You don't even need to hold up three.

[Rachael Martin]

Just, boom, one, two, three. I'm just gonna go, wow. Well, I feel like these are all of a piece. How comfortable are you with being wrong? Oh, I feel like you're very. I shouldn't answer the question for you.

[Ann Patchett]

Yeah, I mean, I guess this whole conversation is about. I'm very comfortable being wrong. There's so many things you want to be wrong about. I want to be wrong about. I want to be wrong about climate change. I want to be wrong about the state of our nation. I want to be wrong about so many things, I hope to be wrong. So, yeah, I think I'm really comfortable with it. Also, I have a terrible sense of direction. So at least five times a day, I am wrong.

[Rachael Martin]

You know what? It takes practice. And you're telling me you get a lot of practice, and so you develop a thick skin about it and you just move on. Right. I'm totally with you on that.

[Ann Patchett]

Okay.

[Rachael Martin]

All right, well. Oh, I like that one. Now I'm looking at it. I'm like, should I just put one at number three.

[Ann Patchett]

No, I'm gonna go ahead. Oh, Rachel, this is so important. You can cheat and I won't know the difference.

[Rachael Martin]

I know, but that I need people to understand this.

[Ann Patchett]

I don't cheat.

[Rachael Martin]

The cards are in control.

[Ann Patchett]

Okay, three, please.

[Rachael Martin]

Okay, three. What's an expression of love you're trying to get better at.

[Ann Patchett]

Boy? Complete acceptance. Complete blanket acceptance, which is the love my husband gives to me, just accepts me for who I am always, no matter what. And I think I've always been somebody who wants to fix. And I work very hard to not fix and to just see the people in my life and accept them for who they are and love them for who they are. I am a big fan of Greg Boyle, and Greg Boyle is a Jesuit priest who founded Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, the world's largest gang prevention and rehabilitation program in the world. And his whole thing is, everyone is perfect the way they are, everyone is beloved, everyone is accepted, no matter what. And I think there you are, Greg Boyle, working in gang prevention and rehabilitation and able to look at anyone who has done anything with complete love and acceptance. And all I need to do is not say to my husband, maybe you want to wear a coat? It's a little cold. Okay. All right. So I've got a much lower bar to get over I love.

[Rachael Martin]

Is this right?

[Ann Patchett]

I think I read this. That you dedicated the original version of.

[Rachael Martin]

Bel Canto to the man who is now your husband, and you weren't married, you were just dating?

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Yes.

[Ann Patchett]

What kind of madness was that?

[Rachael Martin]

That's way crazier than going back and re annotating your original book.

[Ann Patchett]

That's so nuts. And I want to tell you my second novel, which was a book no one ever read, called Taft. And I dedicated it to my boyfriend at the time. And I found out that he was, shall we say, stepping out on me as the book was going to press. And I frantically called my publisher and said, can you pull this? And they were like, hang on, let me check. Yes, we got it back.

[Rachael Martin]

Is that right?

[Ann Patchett]

Yes. Oh, my God, yes. And I got it back.

[Rachael Martin]

It's like you stopped the tattoo artist.

[Ann Patchett]

Right as they were about to go into your arm. And I dedicated it to my beloved cousins, and, boy, done.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

I.

[Ann Patchett]

And I thought, never gonna make that mistake again. But then I met the right guy, and I dedicated the book to him. And we weren't married because I didn't want to get married. And I. But I knew that I would always be with him.

[Rachael Martin]

Yeah, well, I love that. He that he sets that standard for you of like such acceptance. It's a good bellwether to have.

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[Rachael Martin]

We're moving to the final round.

[Ann Patchett]

Okay.

[Rachael Martin]

One, two, three, three three. I'm just gonna say three please.

[Ann Patchett]

Yes.

[Rachael Martin]

How have your feelings about God changed over time?

[Ann Patchett]

Oh, did you write that one for me?

[Rachael Martin]

No.

[Ann Patchett]

Oh, okay. So there's a lot about God in Belcanto. There's a lot about faith. And one of the things that I found very moving when I went back to it was I was much closer to my Catholic faith when I was 35 or 34, when I was writing that book, 36 when it came out. And you know, it's a two part thing. There's God and then there's Catholicism, which I always say Catholicism is to God. What sorority is to college. It's, you know, for some people it's everything. For some people it's nothing. For other people it's part of the experience. I still believe in God. And here's the thing. If I tried to tell you what that meant, I would be wrong. The only thing that I know for sure is that whatever I know is wrong and it does not behoove me to spend a moment's time thinking about it. We are alive. And that's an astonishing gift. And it seems very possible to me that being Alive is God, and that the trick is whether or not we know it. The trick is whether or not we can keep our focus and remember that we are, for all of the suffering, the recipient of the most beautiful gift for a limited period of time, which is our life.

[Rachael Martin]

I guess I'm interested in your preservation of the word God to define that. I've gone through my own journey. God, I hate the word journey, but I've gone through my own evolution when it comes to the faith that I was brought up with. My spiritual inheritance from my parents, who were very religious people, Christian people. And so I've struggled with what God means. The Word carries so much for me, but because of how I was raised. And so it feels very dramatic for me to say I don't believe in God. But I guess I appreciate that you, even though you are no longer a Catholic and don't identify that way, that you.

[Ann Patchett]

Yes, I do. You are. I don't go to church, but I do still call myself a Catholic. Yes.

[Rachael Martin]

Why?

[Ann Patchett]

Sorry to interrupt. No, no, no.

[Rachael Martin]

But that's even more interesting. I mean, if you somehow found your way to separate yourself from the bits of the church that you didn't that weren't resonating with you and you still preserved because Catholicism is pretty regimented. Right, right. So you still believe like the Pope is the intermediary between God and the person?

[Ann Patchett]

No, no, no. I am still a Catholic, and there is an enormous amount about Catholicism that I don't believe and am appalled by. I am still an American, and there is an enormous amount about being an American that I don't believe in and that I am appalled by. I am a Tennessean. There is an enormous amount about being a Tennessean that I don't believe in, and I am appalled by. But I am those things. And there are about all of those things, parts that I love and. And I'm proud of. So when I was a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence, I had a humanism teacher. We had a class called Humanism. And it was a point in my life where I thought, I loathe Catholicism. I want nothing to do with this. This is just an anathema to everything of who I am and who I believe in, what I believe in. And I went out to dinner at the Raceway Diner, I remember, in Yonkers with my humanism teacher. And I told him my problems, and he said, if you're going looking for something as big as God, just go where you're comfortable. Go with what you know. Doesn't make any difference. You're not going to pick a better religion. You're not going to pick a better set of words. It's not about the words. It's not about the religion. Don't waste your time picking out your luggage. Just go on the trip.

[Rachael Martin]

Who cares?

[Ann Patchett]

Who knows? Who cares? What matters is that we do our best with the life that we have. That we show up, that we love each other, and that we try to be as aware as is humanly possible of the life and the gift that we're given and to help other people wherever we can.

[Rachael Martin]

Last one.

[Ann Patchett]

Okay. Three, please.

[Rachael Martin]

Do you think about the legacy you leave behind?

[Ann Patchett]

No.

[Rachael Martin]

Aunt Patchett, it's been so great having you on the show.

[Ann Patchett]

I've loved this.

[Rachael Martin]

This has really been fun. Wait, give me one more beat on that. Give me one more thing. Because it's not interesting. Because we're all here for a time, and then we go. And then people forget us and move on.

[Ann Patchett]

Dead's Dead's dead.

[Rachael Martin]

Gosh.

[Ann Patchett]

My husband and I were updating our will recently, as one does, and. And we were both saying, we don't care. We don't care. It doesn't matter. The other one will make the right choices. Or if we die together, everybody else will make the right choice. And the lawyer said, okay, but Ann, what if he marries somebody right away and then she gets all the rights to your novels and she gets all of your royalty stream, and he dies a week later? And this person, who you have no connection to, gets all of your royalties and has complete control over your literary legacy. And I was like, james, I'm dead. Why do I care? Don't humor yourself into thinking that you have control over things over which you have no control. Yeah.

[Rachael Martin]

Why are you so smart, Ann Patchett?

[Ann Patchett]

Years working on it. Years alone, digging up moss in the woods, avoiding the rattlesnakes and the blackberries. You just get it all together.

[Rachael Martin]

Okay, so we end the show the same way every time. With a trip in our memory time machine. Okay. We go back, go back, go back.

[Ann Patchett]

And you get to pick one moment.

[Rachael Martin]

From your past that you would not change anything about. You would just like to linger there a little while longer. What moment do you choose?

[Ann Patchett]

I'm. Gosh, there are so many. I'm gonna say the moss. Am I gonna regret that? It doesn't have to be the be all, end all, just whatever's in the front of your mind. But I'm worried that the moss is in the front of my mind just because we've been talking about it.

[Rachael Martin]

Okay, take another minute.

[Ann Patchett]

Let me. Let me just take. You would think that this is the question you always wind up with. So this would be the one that I actually could have prepared for.

[Rachael Martin]

Nah, it's more fun to see kind of like what comes up, you know, the moss.

[Ann Patchett]

The moss sitting in the woods by myself, maybe with a dog or two in childhood on that farm. And it's not that childhood was all that happy, but those moments of nature and complete silence, those moments before anything called me away to do something else. You know, that sense of time when no one's going to call you until it's dark. I remember when I was a kid, I used to think so much about that whole thing of if a tree falls alone in the forest. And I would always think, I'm here, I'm here. If the tree falls, I'll hear it, I'll see it. It's a real Charlotte's Web kind of world. A girl and her pig out in the countryside. Ann Patchett.

[Rachael Martin]

Her new annotated version of her best.

[Ann Patchett]

Selling novel Bel Canto has just come out.

[Rachael Martin]

I so appreciate having had the chance.

[Ann Patchett]

To do this with you. I so appreciate you inviting me on because this has really been very moving.

[Rachael Martin]

Thank you so much. If you like this episode, you should listen to my episode with Taffy Brodesser Akner. She's another person whose relationship with the religion she grew up with. In Taffy's case, Judaism has stayed with her in adulthood, has grounded her. This episode was produced by Romel Wood and edited by Dave Blanchard. It was mastered by Robert Rodriguez. Wildcard's executive producer is Yolanda Sangweni and our theme music is by Ramtin Arablouei. You can reach out to [e-mail] we'll shuffle the deck and be back with more next week. Talk to you then.

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