What I Learned from Ann Patchett about Reading Our Past Writing: A Lesson for Memoirists, Novelists, and Human Beings
Ann Patchett’s Annotated Bel Canto: A Writer’s Self-Critique
You probably know who Ann Patchett is. If you don't, now you're going to. Ann is owner of Parnassus Books, a wonderful bookstore in Nashville, where I used to live, and she is an international bestselling author. Among the numerous books she's written and published is the novel Bel Canto.
Bel Canto is probably her most well-known novel—after it came out in 2001, it won the Pen/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize.
But the reason I'm talking now about a novel that came out 25 years ago is because there is a brand new edition of the novel that I recently read after stumbling on this new edition in an airport. It's this bright blue hardback copy, and it was annotated recently…by Ann.
It is filled with her scribbles in the margins (in her own handwriting, which is fun). And reading it, I found myself realizing something, a kind of set of takeaways for both memoirists and novelists, that I wanted to share.
The novel opens at a fancy birthday party at the vice president's mansion in an unnamed South American country. The party is attended by dignitaries and other high-profile guests, and the entertainment for the evening is a famous American opera singer named Roxane Coss. While Roxanne Coss is performing, a guerilla group storms the mansion and takes everyone hostage. The novel then tracks this hostage crisis inside the home, which lasts about four months. We're with the hostages and terrorists through the entire thing, confined to the house just like they are.
It sounds like a thriller, but it's actually a kind of dreamlike meditation on art and human connection. I'm not giving away any spoilers here when I tell you that Patchett creates a suspended world where the captors and hostages form meaningful relationships…and so the ending is weirdly devastating, though I won't give it away. The sort of quiet claustrophobia and fear that give way to unexpected tender moments actually reminded me a lot of the pandemic, personally, when I read it again recently, post-2020. So that was interesting.
How a Professional Author Thinks About Her Past Work
But pandemic parallels aside, it was fascinating to see Ann's reflections on her novel more than twenty-five years after she wrote it. More specifically—and the reason I'm making a whole podcast episode about this edition—I want to talk about her annotations.
I would put her annotations into 3 categories:
First, she tells little stories about the origin of certain characters and moments. These peter off a little as you move through the book.
Second, she comments on what she's observing in the craft—how the writing feels and what it's doing to her, almost like she's commenting on someone else's work. These were by far my favorite annotations.
And third, she calls out things she doesn't like. She puts brackets around words and phrases that she would cut and makes margin notes about parts that she finds repetitive or wordy.
Interestingly, almost every time she pointed out a repeat word or some idea she conveyed multiple times…I hadn't noticed. Had her annotation not been there, pointing it out, I would have had no idea.
My neighbor Pam, who also re-read this edition this spring, said the same thing. We agreed we were so immersed in the story, we wouldn't ever have noticed the same word appearing three times in one paragraph.
Clearly Ann's editors were in the same boat!
But this third category of annotations is where the lesson is here, and so I want to dig deeper into it.
Writing About My Past Self in My Memoir Draft
To do so, I need to step away from Bel Canto for a moment and talk about myself.
A couple of years ago when I was circulating my memoir draft to early readers, I had this one passage where I thought I was being cute.
In the passage, I was discussing a moment when my husband and I had had an appointment at an IVF clinic and I'd just learned how bad my odds were of it working for me at age forty. In the draft, I wrote a paragraph reflecting as I left the clinic, and I had written something like:
What had I been doing all those years of my thirties? Going to bars and getting drunk with my friends.
I thought I was being cute here. Kind of charming and self-deprecating. But feedback from early readers was that it came across as if Writer Mary was being insensitive to Former Mary. Multiple readers, who were also friends, called me up and were defensive of me.
I remember them saying things like, "No, Mary, you were doing real things that mattered. You were writing novels and enjoying your life."
Of course, they were right. And it wasn't as if I had thought that voice in my head was wise or right when it was dismissive of how I'd spent my thirties. But the decision to give this voice space on the page was coming across to these readers as insensitive and a little mean.
The Craft Lesson Every Memoirist Needs to Know
To circle back to the annotated Bel Canto, when Current Ann criticized Past Ann, I was surprised to find that, like my friends reading my memoir, my attitude was to feel protective and defensive of her younger self. Be gentle with her, I would think. She did a really great job. (And clearly many people agree.)
There's a takeaway here for memoirists from a craft perspective.
Yes, you want an emotional arc. You want to show the reader how you changed; that's what a memoir is.
But be wary of skewering your former self, or even just being too critical in a way that you may think is cute but that comes across as severe. You want to strike a balance between honesty & humility on one hand and compassion for your former self on the other.
We don't want the reader to have to assume the position of the wiser older sibling or therapist going, “Hey now, let's honor our past self who was doing the best she could, please?"
Embracing Growth as a Writer, Without Shame
Now, what does this have to teach us about overall mindset, not just from a craft perspective, but as people who make art?
I think it's this: The hope is that we're always getting better at our craft.
That is the hope, right? Ideally, our subsequent books are always better than our previous books, because otherwise, we're not improving.
And if we're going to constantly be improving, then it means our old stuff is going to be stuff we'd make differently now, if given the chance. That's just the reality.
But it doesn't have to be a regret. Say it with me: Reality, not regret!
Of course I'd write my books differently now. I'm older. I've lived more. I've refined certain skills. But that doesn't mean those stories are anything other than precisely what they should be; they are creations with a time stamp: who I was, what my world was like, and what skillset I possessed at the time.
There is nothing "wrong" about our work being timestamped by our limitations.
That's all for today. Thanks for being here, and I’ll see you in the next episode!
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