Good Life Project - Ann Patchett | On Solitude, Writing & Indie Bookstores

Episode Date: June 25, 2020

A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Ann Patchett is the multi-award-winning and New York Times Bestselling author of eight novels, including The Patron Saint of Liars, Bel Canto, Run, Commonwealth. and The Dutch House, along with nonfiction works, including Truth & Beauty, about her friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy, What Now? an expansion of her graduation address at Sarah Lawrence College, and This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, a collection of essays examining the theme of commitment. In 2019, she published her first children’s book, Lambslide, illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser. Patchett's work has been translated into more than thirty languages. In November 2011, yearning to stem the flow of great bookstores from Nashville, Tennessee where she lives, Patchett opened Parnassus Books with her business partner Karen Hayes. She has since become a spokesperson for independent booksellers, championing books and bookstores. In 2012 she was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. Interestingly, Patchett does not carry a cell-phone, has never texted, been on social media or, at least in the last few decades, watched TV. We dive into all of this in today's conversation.You can find Ann Patchett at:Website : http://www.annpatchett.com/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/parnassusbooksCheck out our offerings & partners: Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the WheelVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Would it surprise you to know that my guest, Ann Patchett, the author of seven novels, including The Patron Saint of Liars, Belcanto, Run, State of Wonder, and Commonwealth, along with three nonfiction books and her first children's book, Lambslide, would it surprise you to know at all that she has essentially not watched TV in decades, does not own a smartphone, has never been on social media, and never intends to start being on social media, and has a bit of a love affair with solitude? Well, apparently, that is part of her secret sauce of what makes her her and allows her to do the stunning work that she does in the world. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the legendary Iowa Writers Workshop, Anne has been the recipient of numerous different awards and fellowships, including England's Orange Prize, the Penn Faulkner Award.

Her books have been New York Times bestsellers, been translated into more than 30 languages, turned into movies. She has appeared in conversation with everyone from Colbert to Oprah to Martha Stewart and so many others. And this is super cool. In November of 2011, really frustrated at the loss of great bookstores in Nashville, she partnered with a friend to open an independent bookstore, Parnassus Books, in Nashville, Tennessee, where she lives, and has become a bit of a spokesperson for independent booksellers, really championing books and bookstores.

We dive into all of this in today's conversation, along with what it's like to run an indie bookstore in this current environment and so much more. Super excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this much more. Super excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. It's really interesting to have this conversation right now because my husband is a doctor and he's 16 years older than I am. He's 72. And so now these last two months, he's been home for the first time in his life. He's been home for two months and he's loved it. And it's really been this beautiful time.

And today is the day he went back to work and just trying to figure out, do I want to retire? Do I want to stop being a doctor? Do I want to stop having that identity? And I feel so lucky because of course, as a writer, I get to do this, right? Until I don't know what I'm doing anymore. And then hopefully I'll just go to sleep. Yeah, I mean, it's that classic distinction, right, between a job, a career and a vocation.

Yeah. You know, if it's the thing that just calls you and if you're fortunate to have found an outlet in a way where you have the ability to just keep doing that for as long as you want to. What an amazing space to inhabit. Yeah, it's true. And I think for myself all the time about having a career in the arts, and I just think, God, I'm glad I'm not an actress. I'm really glad I'm not a dancer. I'm glad I'm not a singer. Writing is a career that for the most part doesn't age out. Even if you don't do it as well, or you're not as popular, or you don't make money doing it, you can still do it. Yeah. I mean, I almost feel like it's a career that you age in, you know, because you start out and I feel like it's a type of career where the first,

I don't know if you can say the first half, the first quarter, the first third, if you really devote yourself is largely about craft, right? And then you get to a point where you've got enough command over the craft that then you start to step into this next level of expression. But it takes a long time to get there. And I am not aware of any hack that lets you sort of accelerate your path through what can be sometimes a reasonably brutal process of getting to a level of craft where you can start to sort of step into a different window of creation and expression. Well, yeah, but then the flip side of that is there are people who have one story, right? Maybe they can get three or four books out of that story.

Maybe they can get one book out of that story, but they're drawing on something very particular in themselves that doesn't open up and the writing finishes out early. I think that has happened over and over again. And one of the things that's interesting for me is Commonwealth was my autobiographical novel. And so I was 50 when I wrote the book that I probably should have written when I was 25. And I was so aware of the fact that if I had written that book when I was 25, it would have really wrecked things for me because I would have felt like, oh, now I'm tapped out. Now I've told my best story.

So I think it can go either way in writing. Yeah. And if you are the person where you have those two or three books, then I guess you hit the point where you're like, okay, am I just done now? Right. You know, which is okay. But when you look at this and say like, there's something that has breathed me about this from the time, you know, from the earliest days that I can remember, and I don't want to stop until I absolutely have to, which is, it sounds like by all accounts is absolutely your wiring. And I know this touched on your life so early. It seems like reading was a huge part of you as a kid.

Was writing also? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, and I've puzzled about this a lot in my life. You know, why is it that when I met somebody when I was five years old, and they said, What are you going to do when you grow up? And I would say, I'm going to be a writer. I mean, it was just baseline. And that is the most interesting thing about me. And perhaps the only interesting thing about me, and perhaps the only interesting thing about me, is that I've always known exactly what I wanted to do. I never wavered from it, and I got to do it. And that puts me in such a tiny, tiny sliver of humanity. I knew it. I always knew it. I did it. And I didn't want anything else. I never thought, and I'd like to live in Paris for a year. I'd like to travel the world. I'd like to have money, get married, have children. Nothing, nothing. I just wanted to be a writer.

I mean, you can't answer this question, but it is fast. What is it? What was it inside of you at five years old that just knew? I mean, it couldn't have been a clear understanding of what the life of a writer was because you're five. And yet it was so clear to you. I have a theory. And my theory is I didn't know how to read. And my parents got divorced, probably I was four. My mother and sister and I left Los Angeles and moved to Tennessee the week before I turned six. I had already started first grade at five in Los Angeles. I didn't finish school. We just moved constantly. We stayed with a lot of people. It was 1969. Nobody went to school. I really didn't learn how to read until

I was in the third grade. And so I think that somehow in my mind, I conflated the desire to learn how to read, to learn how physically to write, to not always be passing and sneaking and, you know, squeaking by in one way or another, that I started to say, I want to write, I want to write, I want to write. And I became very clever. So even though I really couldn't read or write, I could tell a story. I could be amusing. I could seem smart. And I had it in my mind that that was the thing that was going to really save me. And it stuck by me. Therefore, I stuck by it. I mean, it's interesting that you could tell a story where you sort of walking around formulating stories in your head? Yeah. So which follows you then to later, because you're the creative process that you have described, which is so different from what a lot of other writers describe is this idea of basically building the entire world and the characters in the story in your head for as

long as humanly possible until it has to burst out onto a page. It sounds like that seed was planted really early. Yeah, that's interesting. I actually, I've never made that correlation, but that is true because I really couldn't write. I worked in my head and then got to a point where I could get down whatever I could get down and that became my way of working. And then later, you know, when I was in my 20s and I was a waitress, and I just got into the habit of always having a story in my head, something that I was thinking about all the time, as a way of keeping myself company, as a way of feeling that my life mattered, that it had depth. So I was a waitress, but I was also a waitress who was writing a novel in my head while I was

rolling silverware. Yeah. I mean, it's almost like that was, you're getting paid for the process of incubating the story. That's the story that eventually becomes you're getting paid for the process of incubating the story that eventually, that's the story that eventually becomes the patron saint of liars, right? Right, right. Yeah. I mean, it's such an interesting process because it also, you have to have a huge capacity to hold things and people and ideas and worlds and storylines and plots in your head to do that. I wonder if it's sort of the type of thing where it's a trainable skill to be able to do that.

You know, one thing that I think about all the time is I'm constantly surprised that there's something that I can do that other people can't do. So I think, well, you could hold a book in your head. I mean, in my mind, if we meet, if you and I meet and we like each other and, you know, I call you up a week later and say, let's have lunch. And then, you know, later on we go to the movies, whatever. We begin a friendship. And I, at some point, ask you about your childhood. And I ask you if you have siblings. And I ask you about your parents. And then I forget, did you have a sister? Did you tell me that already? Were you married before? Do you have kids? What are their names? How old are they? I'm going to forget. And then I'm going to ask you again. And then I'm going to remember. That's how we exist as humans. We don't go home and take notes on the people that we meet, the people that we want to befriend or join our lives with in some way. We forget, we remember, we forget, we remember, we ask again, we look again.

And that's exactly what writing a novel is like. I go and I look again. And when people say, why don't you write it down? And I always think, well, as soon as I write something down, I've committed it. And then it feels important. Whereas if I don't write it down, I forget. And it falls away. If it falls away, then I need to go and look again. I'm working on a couple of different things right now because this is such a weird time. And I'm writing children's books right now because I just can't imagine writing about the adult world.

It would be like writing a book the week after September 11th. You know, you don't know where the ground is right now. But I have an idea for a novel that I had before the world changed. And I think about it sometimes. And I think I don't want to write a grown-up novel about the pandemic. This time will pass. You won't think it will, but it will. Just like September 11th doesn't play a central role in every novel that's been written since. But there are moments that I have insight because the world is informing me now, and my mind is changing. And I'm glad that I didn't take any notes on this book because it

means that my mind can change and everything is open in the same way I don't know if you're experiencing this now but the friendships are changing I find myself connecting to people that I haven't connected to in a long time and some of the people that I feel the very closest to I've hardly been in touch with at all. It's like actors on a stage and the people with the smallest parts are moving into leading roles. Has that been true for you? Yeah. It's interesting. I hadn't reflected on that before you brought it up, but yeah, it is. And I think also family, I've been in much more regular contact with family who are spread out across the country. And yeah, certain people who are certainly tangential

players have become much more regular in conversation in my life and others have sort of faded into the background. I wonder what that's about. I wonder if it's just sort of a subconscious reordering of who you find a true sense of companionship with. Or maybe just in this moment, what is the quality of relationships that you really need to be okay on a day-to-day basis? Yeah. I find right now the person that I am in enormous need of, who is in enormous need of me, is my childhood best friend from when I was seven. And I mean, it's like the house is on fire and we're just holding on to each other. And it's so interesting because, you know, we're friendly and we're close, but we are so interdependent right now. And if you had given me a list of all the people in my life and said, all right, you know, who's moving into the number one spot? I would not have thought Tavia, but there she is. She is definitely the people where you have the deepest shared history with, where there's the unspoken language that just exists with such ease that you're looking for

a sense of shared history and effortlessness? I think it's that, but I have also undergone a huge change in this time. How so? You know, we dare not speak of it, but this horrible, horrible time in which the world is collapsing and people are dying and all of these terrible things are going on, and there is a way in which I have never been happier, which feels like such an awful thing to say. But I'm such an introvert, and I have led the life of an extremely successful extrovert. I give talks, I fill symphony halls, I do so many things, I travel, I'm engaged. And to be able to go home and just be quiet again and not be thinking, I've got to get on a plane. I've got to meet this person. I've got to do this thing, unless it's virtual, unless it's with

a recording device. I feel these chunks of myself falling away, armor, scaffolding, all of my protective mechanisms are gone. And I feel so heart open. And I feel like the person I was when I was a child. And I think also there's that sense of life doesn't last. That's the central contract. We're not getting out of this alive. So when we're put in a position of having to remember that every single minute, it brings forth either fear or an almost impossible joie de vivre, you know, that life is so beautiful. This is not forever. This is right now. It's the highest meditative state. There is no past. There is no future. There is this moment. There is this breath. That is what we are living. And I feel I am living that so completely every minute right now, the world of unbearable beauty. And so I think that my connection to Tavia is in part that because we were those children together. And also she has held onto that part of herself better than anyone I've ever known. She is still her beautiful child self and can kind of meet my beautiful child self

again. It's been lovely. Yeah, that's amazing. I do also have that same sense of forcing, being forced into, actually not being forced into, like his awareness, daily awareness of his impermanence was the most powerful thing to make him come alive. And agree, I mean, well, none of us would have asked for this moment. And there is, I'm in New York City, so I'm in the center of it all. You know, nobody that I know has gotten to this point without knowing people that are no longer here. And at the same time, you experience the loss and the grief and you feel what you need to feel. And also, if you can find the capacity to zoom the lens out just a bit, just enough to let you see, okay, so all of this will be gone as will I, and I'm a similar age to

you, so I'm in the second half of things. How do I want to spend that time? And I was here for 9-11 also. And there was a similar feeling in the months that followed that. So I agree. I mean, it's interesting what you brought up also about your fundamental wiring as an introvert and how this has sort of shut down so many of the things that had you not only exist outside of that social orientation, but also arm yourself to be okay in that world. So it's not just that you can

be back in this state that's most natural to you, but all of the effort that went into putting up the shields and the scaffolding and the structure to make you okay, like that effort gets, gets let go too. So it's, I would imagine there's a certain lightness that comes with all of that. Absolutely. It gets funneled just back into your life, into your day. And, and I am having a sort of revelation as we're talking about all of this too, which is it makes sense on that level that I want to write for children right now. That the stories that I can tell, the stories that just make so much sense

and make me want to get up and go to my computer in the morning are helping children make order out of their world because I feel so close to that part of myself right now. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting when you think about that's the thing that you're drawn to writing and the person that you really have yearned to rekindle your friendship with is the person who you knew when you were seven. It's all full circle. As we sit here, you're at a point where you've had a stunning career. Why, thanks.

And plenty to come. Not had, as in it's over. Closing that chapter. You never know. Your exposure, I guess, to literature came at a really young age. You were reading things like Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, when I think most people were reading Archie comics. And it's been interesting to see, especially when I reflect on that story in particular, and I think about a lot of what you've written since then, a lot of the weirdness that we're in now. It's sort of like there's so much similarity between that one. It's all about dropping people who didn't know each other really in any meaningful

way and you would never expect to see together into these worlds that they're not familiar with and seeing what happens, which as a country feels like is happening right now. Yeah. Yeah. I did a book club on the BBC a couple of days ago. They were reading Belcanto. And I haven't read Belcanto in 20 years. It came out in 2001. So the last time I read it was in 2000. And sure you know, like, sure, you know, you want to ask all of England to read Bel Canto. I'm happy to show up for that. As long as you order from Parnassus Books. That's right. Exactly. Exactly. We'll ship it to you. We should talk about that. But while we were talking, I was thinking, damn, yeah, that is a good idea. This is the book you should be reading right now. Because I do write a lot about people in isolation. And it

is the Magic Mountain and Lord of the Flies and the Poseidon Adventure and all those things. Yeah. Yeah. Especially now, I think it's prescient and relevant in a lot of different ways. We'll be right back. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. When you think about that lens with the kids' books that you're writing now, does that flow into it at all? Or is there something different that you feel you're channeling into those books? No, actually, the thing that I'm writing about for children has to do with introverts and extroverts. Oh, no kidding. Yeah.

And that is the thing that's showing up, that pairing is showing up again and again in everything that I'm doing. Because I look in my life, and of course, I have a a ton of friends who are introverts and I have a few friends who are extroverts and the extroverts are suffering. Oh, hugely right now. Yeah. I mean, it's hell on earth for them. And the introverts are like, Hey, we're good. How are you? So just, just from that sort of basic hard wiring, that's so interesting to me. And also how the introverts and the extroverts are living together. Yeah. Susan Cain is an old friend of mine who wrote the book, Quiet. Oh, I love that book. It was so important to me. Oh, so me too, because we share a similar wiring. I'm introverted. I love to be in a creative cave. I'm fine in solitude for a long, long time.

Yeah. Then I'll step out and be hyper public and then retreat back. Right. You know, because that's my happy place. That book really explained me to myself. But also it was interesting because I think a lot of people bought that book to give to the extroverts in their lives to say, okay, so this is me, like here's, and I'm not broken. And now you can understand. And so in moments like this, where you're sharing, you've got a blend of introverts and extroverts forced into a small

space together for weeks or months at a time. And they often don't pair well, especially when the introverts for the first time are the ones who aren't broken and the extroverts are feeling broken. I mean, what an upside down topsy-turvy universe to be living in. Yeah. I really believe that we're going to rise up and lead the world. I remember when Quiet came out, I got it on audio and my husband and I listened to it while we were driving to Mississippi. He's from Mississippi and his mom is there. And he kept saying to me, all these things that have really irritated me about you all these years, all these things that I thought you had made a choice to be this way. You know, it was some sort of an affectation, which that in itself was great because I had

no idea that those things were irritating to him because he's so nice. He never said this to me, but he said, you know, it's like I'm getting you just as I'm listening to this book. So, yeah, please, on behalf of introverts everywhere, tell her I said thank you. Yeah. When you think about sort of focusing your energies, I mean, one of the things that's taken up a lot of space for you since 2011, I guess, was you're out there writing books public then going back. And at some point, long time in Nashville, two bookstores left. Those two bookstores, and I guess they weren't really even bookstores. Well, they were bookstores, but they were mega bookstores.

There was Borders, and then there was one that was bought 12, 15 years earlier by a larger brand. But eventually those go away. You're the happiest person in the world in solitude and being out there when you have to be and just writing. You are a writer's writer. Somehow you decide that that is the moment in time for you to become the owner of an independent bookstore I was never that person. And in fact, I feel uncomfortable in bookstores because my mind associates bookstores with being on book tour

and with feeling kind of hunted and overwhelmed. But the bookstores went away. There were all sorts of people forming committees about what they were gonna do to get a bookstore. Nothing was happening. And I just thought, oh, damn, damn, it's going to be me, isn't it? I went to Catholic school for 12 years. And there's this whole thing of, if you can formulate the sentence, whose responsibility is it to fix the public school system or clean up this trash or make the world a better place?

You know, the answer is always, it is your responsibility. So whose responsibility is it to open a bookstore and get this problem solved? Ah, alas, it must be mine. And I was introduced to a woman named Karen Hayes. And we met the last day of April. And we opened the bookstore on November 15. And the idea would was that Karen would run the store and I would pay for it. And we would be partners. And I have wound up as Karen, as Karen often says, you know, you're, you're the loudest silent partner that anyone's ever had. But I've become sort of not just the face of Parnassus Books, but of independent bookstores and shopping local. And I became the representative for the Book Industry Charitable Foundation. I just, it became my thing. And it's wonderful. It's a little exhausting sometimes. But what I, there's so many things about it. I wouldn't, I wouldn't change anything. I have really, really loved it. I've found enormous joy in it. is when people come up to me now in the grocery store, they're not coming up to talk to me about

one of my books. They're coming to talk to me about what they're reading and about the bookstore and about, you know, some staff member who was fantastically helpful and who gave them exactly the book they wanted, or they heard me recommending a book, and they loved it, and they're grateful. And I can really interact with people on that level. That brings me joy. Somebody walks up to me in the grocery store and says, I love the Dutch house. I'm like, okay, wow, thanks. I gotta go get an orange now. But if somebody walks up to me and says, oh my gosh, I read your recommendation of Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore and the first novel, I wouldn't have picked it up. Boy, that book changed my life. That was so amazing. Thank you so much. Oh, I love that book. And then I can

enter into that moment and that relationship. So it gives me a public face that feels natural and not like I'm hiding. It is me without scaffolding or protection if I'm talking about the bookstore and books and other writers. When I went on book tour this last time, my entire talk was about books that I love and writers who I had met along the way who helped me figure things out about the Dutch house and books that I want to sell, that I want to get behind. And I thought this is a real revelation because if I can go out in public and talk about other people's books instead of talking about my book, I feel really comfortable. Yeah. I mean, how much, it's interesting too, because to a certain extent, part of that, I also feel is it's your passion, it's your love, it's your deep knowledge of what's out there. And also part of it is that you're, I have to imagine, you have reached a point in your own career where you don't necessarily have to go out there and every time you step into a bookstore every time you step onto a stage you like the the line in your mind

doesn't have to be I need to sell my book yes but it's also complicated because one of the things that's really changed since I have the bookstore and my friends who are my peers are always saying to me, at this point in your life. And that's true. I don't. Except now I know that what keeps a bookstore going is somebody who can sell a motherload of books showing up and doing that for the night. You know, we had a truly disastrous Instagram live event with John Grisham a couple of days ago. You know, it's like nobody can get the technology straight. And it was a complete bust. And it was nobody's fault because the internet just kept cutting out. But you know, here's John Grisham. And he's saying, I want to do something to support independent bookstores. So I'm going to go around to these independent bookstores and do this Instagram live thing. He didn't have to do that. He understands that that's what's keeping us in business. That's what helps us make our payroll and pay our health

insurance and all of that. So at this point in my life where, yeah, technically to sell a Patchett novel, I don't have to show up and do these big events every night. But I also now really know that that's what keeps bookstores going. There's something bigger that's behind what you're doing. Yeah. And the people, the really big people who come out and do these huge events. Glennon Doyle. Yeah, her last event that she did before she canceled her tour for Untamed, which is still sitting in the number one spot on the bestseller list, she came to Nashville.

It was 1,600 people. It was bundled, so all those books were pre-sold. And she showed up. It was like the last night on earth that anybody did an event. That was so huge for us. Huge. I am so grateful to her for doing that. And not only that, you know, that's one end of the scale, but then the other end of the scale is, you know, the person who's got the first book out and maybe 10 people or 15 people show up for the event. But you get heard and those people connect to the writer and they read the

book and they recommend the book to their friends. And that's how you build a career. And that's the other reason the bookstore has to be there. Yeah. I mean, it's a powerful, it's not the backup reason at this point. It's sort of the primary driver of doing this. Yeah. I mean, it's a powerful, it's not the backup reason at this point. It's sort of the primary driver of doing this. And I think a lot of people, you know, it's funny, probably around the time that you opened Parnassus, you know, the world was saying, not only is a bookstore a hard thing to run, but bookstores aren't going to, indie bookstores, they're just not going to exist. Give it a year or two and it's not just this, but the beast is going to be gone.

Right. Books are going to be gone. We're all going to get an e-reader and that's going to be that. Right. And it's been fascinating to see sort of the cultural phenomenon of indie bookstores, not only not dying, but from what I know, and I'm sure you have the data in much more detail than I do, they may be the one part of book selling that's actually growing. Well, at least until the last couple of months. Yeah. And even then, and I don't have any idea how it's shaken down for everybody, we're closed, obviously, but we're shipping books, right?

You can go on the internet and order books from us. Amazon has deprioritized books, so you can order a book with Amazon Prime. It may take three weeks to get there. You order a book from us, it's going to get there right away. But people have shown up for us in such an amazing way. And right now, we have 5,000 square feet. Our entire bookstore has been given over to shipping. So there are like seven or eight of us working. I'm working. We're all just putting books in boxes as fast as we can and writing loving notes. Thank you so much.

But if you want something to be there when this is over, you have to support it now. And that's a lot of the reason that, again, even now I'm going out and I'm banging that drum and writing op-eds. And to anyone who will listen, if you love your bookstore, call them up and order a book, order a puzzle, order whatever it is, because you need to keep them alive. Yeah. I wonder how that's going to translate out even into just local mom and pop businesses that have really been a part of the community and whether people in the community will step up and say, you know, maybe I'm even paying more and maybe there's no convenience in getting it faster or better, but this just matters.

I don't want this to go away and I will do whatever I need to do to make sure that it actually stays. It was interesting. I'm on the Upper West Side in New York City and there was an indie bookstore here for a number of years that just went out a couple of months before, probably the beginning of this year. And as soon as they closed down, there were Post-it notes that started covering the windows of the front of the bookstore.

And you're like, what happened? We miss you. Don't go away. And it was interesting, the owners ended up putting a thing in the window because what tends to happen in New York, and maybe it happens elsewhere, is if something like the beloved indie bookstore in a neighborhood goes out, the neighborhood gets pretty rageful towards the landlord, towards the owner of the space. And they had to put something up saying, listen, they've worked with us. We've done everything we can to try and make this work. They've been very gracious,

you know, they've, you know, we were way behind in a mortgage because people were so fiercely protective. But, you know, I wondered, you know, what would have happened had they gone out to the community first? And maybe they did, and I just wasn't aware of it, but had, you know, rather than, okay, the windows are papered over and now you see all the Post-it notes saying, oh, we wish this didn't happen. You know, how could you create the sense of, it's not just the owner shop, but it's our shop beforehand

on a level where people would literally help financially make it okay. If they knew that it was genuinely at risk of not being there anymore. It is a story that is all and only about rent. And when people say, you know, what are you doing differently? That's making it work for you. I always say I have a great landlord and that's, he is the third partner in our business in a lot of ways. In New York, I have no idea how it can work because if you're selling a book on the Upper West Side or you're selling the same book in Natchez, Mississippi, your profit is exactly

the same. You can't upcharge on a book. They set the price. And in fact, everybody wants you to discount because Amazon is discounting, which is just impossible. There is no way that you can make that rent. And if people step forward and help, they're going to help for a couple of months, but they can't underwrite your rent for the rest of your life. I mean, it's almost inconceivable that you can make a little indie bookstore work when rent is that high. Now, the interesting question is what's going to happen on the Isle of Manhattan after this pandemic? Because there's so much retail space in New York that is empty right now anyway, and it's going to double, triple, whatever. So will there be this wake-up call that says we have to reprioritize? I mean, for God's sakes, if Barneys can't pay their rent, then how is a little bookstore going to pay their rent?

Because the upcharge on a Dolce & Gabbana dress is a lot more than it is on a novel. Yeah, it is amazing. And my wife and I have been walking around, we were noticing the same thing even before everything completely shuttered here in the city. Almost half of every block in our neighborhood, the retail space was out because people just couldn't afford the rent anymore, which you don't think about in New York. And I wonder if the shakeout from this is going to be a forced reduction in rents, which you don't think about in New York. And I wonder if the shakeout from this is going to be a forced reduction in rents, which maybe somehow the negotiated benefit is that maybe some of the more community-driven, smaller

owned places end up having the ability to step back in and play more of a prominent role, which would be interesting. Because, you know, bit by bit, we all wind up living in the exact same strip mall. You know, it's William Sonoma, it's The Gap, it's, you know, whatever, the same store over and over and over again. And it's an interesting phenomenon in Nashville, which has had such a boom in the last five,

seven, eight years. And people want to move here because it's got that quirky, independent feel. They've got the little local stores, local restaurants. But then everybody comes in, the market prices have driven up, and suddenly those little businesses, which are the flavor of the city, get driven out. You know, at what point does somebody say, this is what makes our city attractive? Why live in New York if you're just in a strip mall that's like every place else in the world? Yeah, I mean, it's the flavor of the city. It is that stuff that makes it unique. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

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Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th.

Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him them y'all need a pilot flight risk as you sit here and the stores close but you're shipping really nicely when you who knows when we emerge from this who knows when things open again are you spinning at all on what things might look like when we do and how, like

any ideas on how you would want them to be different? No, because what this time really has done for me has finally made me a good Buddhist. And I do really feel like I'm living in this moment. And I can think forever about how it's going to look in six months or a year, two years. And the only thing that I know for certain is that of our income comes from events. I know that we are not going to be having 1,600 people showing up for the bookstore in which I put on ball gowns because I own ball gowns. And, you know, I get the jewelry and the shoes and the makeup and the hair, and I put on a ball gown and I hold up a book and I'm like, the Night Watchman guys, Louise Erdrich, this is my favorite book. Anything I can do to make people excited about books, to make people think, oh, this is clever. I'm going to just show up and see what she's wearing, if nothing else. I feel like what it's doing is bringing out a level of innovation that will do pretty much anything. Mother's Day boxes, Father's Day boxes.

You name it, we'll make it. Right. Yeah. No, it's true. Which is, I mean, it's pretty cool. And at the same time, you know, I'm familiar with your feelings about technology and social media. You are one of the people who's largely a ghost in that space. No, I'm never, I've never even looked at it. It's so funny. It's like I've made all these videos and I've never seen them. That's what I'm thinking. I'm like, okay, so how do you go from intentionally not existing in that space, not interacting in that space, not putting things into the space or taking anything out of the space to saying, this is kind of the only space that I have right now.

What do I do with that? How do I get comfortable with it? What makes sense to me? And how do I also at the same time, while I must step into this space to keep this thing that I love dearly alive, how do I create new barriers and boundaries to still be okay? Not a problem because it goes back to the whole thing of people coming up to me in the grocery store. You know, I am not going on as Ann Patchett, a novelist. I am, that doesn't exist. I mean, there, I have never once looked at Facebook.

I've never seen Instagram. I've never done any of that. The bookstore has it. So I show up for the bookstore and I do these things. And again, I don't see them, nor do I see the comments. And that feels like a really comfortable way of doing it. And I don't feel like, oh, I'm selling out on my values because I still don't really understand what social media is about. Was the decision for you originally to just not engage in those channels in that way about not wanting to open the conversation, not wanting to see what people are saying about you

or your work? No, no. It was entirely different. No, it was like, you know, when everybody started doing crack in the nineties, I just thought, wow, that's probably not a good idea, but I could really see that if you started it, you know, it would be delicious and then it would be really hard to stop. I never tried it, right? I just never walked through the door. So it wasn't a decision. I don't carry a cell phone.

I have a little flip phone that I use when I travel, but otherwise it's in a sock drawer. I've never texted, you know, like no one has the number. I don't want to knock seven new doors in my house. I don't want to give you seven new ways to get a hold of me. I write novels. Every single thing you need from me, everything that I would ever have to give you that was worth anything is in the Dutch house. So if you're interested in me, in what I'm thinking and what i'm doing that's the very best of myself i don't need to interact with the world any more than that yeah and and at the same time the fact that you don't gives you a volume of creative bandwidth that would have been taken up

yeah engaging in all these different channels. And when you just say no, it's all of a sudden, I don't know how much RAM gets freed up in the creative brain to just do the work. I'm actually really excited when I find somebody who I want to talk to and I can't find any profiles anywhere about them. Because A, it makes me really curious about that choice because it becomes really clear that it's intentional. And then I'm really curious about what they're doing with that time. You know, and are they actually using it

to create output that is not just good, that is not just great, but is stunning in its potential. And I feel like when you do that, it gives you just the capacity, the bandwidth to go to a place creatively that a lot of other people probably just don't have access to because 25% of their cognitive bandwidth and their concern is wrapped up in the engaging and all these, like you said, the seven different doors, you know, all day, every day. Like I don't watch television, which I haven't done. I haven't watched television since my early twenties, probably.

And I don't mean I watch a little, I mean, never, never. So I never saw The Sopranos. I never saw Breaking Bad. People are always saying oh this it's the golden age of television so amazing i'm sure it is but who the hell has time to watch these things that go on for hours and hours and hours like i i can't i can't figure out where everyone else is getting the time and plus it would cut into your opera time. Even that, you know, the Met is putting up operas every single night. And people are saying,

are you watching the Met live stream? I was like, no, I'm reading all these books. I'd love to, I'd love to plunk down four hours in the evening and watch the Met live stream, but I'm not even getting close to it. I love that that's your orientation. And I keep wanting to challenge myself to embrace it for a window of time, because I'm really happy when I'm just in my own space, not interacting. And I know I actually have, you know, I am somebody who sort of interacts in different spaces. And I have a little thing that I get on my phone every Sunday that tells me how much time I've been interacting in all these spaces. And I've been thinking to myself lately, I'm actually about to start into a new book myself. And I'm like, okay, so what if I literally just shut this down for a certain window of time? And I don't

have to make a lifetime commitment now, but what if I just said not now, like for like now until X date, my job is to just go into my crave and create. And how would that change the quality of my life, the quality of my experiences, the quality of what I was able to actually make? So I think it's an experiment I'm about to run on myself. But remember, I mean, don't give me credit. I get no, but I get no credit for this because the difference is I never tried crack. You are talking about getting off of crack for three or four months. And those two things have nothing in common, right? Like, I don't know

what I'm missing. I never looked. I never opened the door. So it's, there's no nobility in it. I just, I just didn't ever pick it up. Yeah, it's a difference for sure. Although I have never had a relationship where it's something that brings me joy. For me, it's always been more of an obligation. So it'll be interesting running that experiment. We've been bouncing around back and forth in time a lot in our conversation, even reflecting on now and what we think the future will hold in the past, which is interesting to me too, because so much, one of the things that fascinates me about what you've done and pretty much all of your writing is you play with time in really interesting ways, you know, from the earliest books from Belcanto where you're like, oh, well, this is something that should take 24 hours. Like,

no. To then your last couple of books, you know, and the Dutch house where you're talking about, let's tell a story over a period of decades or generations. Is that a, I mean, do you have fascination with time and how people interact with worlds and themselves over really extended windows of time? I have a fascination with time. And every writer I know has a fascination with time. It's just so central to everything. So time was getting more compressed in my books. Run takes place over 24 hours. State of Wonder takes place over three weeks. And I finally thought, okay, I'm really crunching it here. I need to stretch out. So I made a very conscious decision in Commonwealth to write a book that takes place over four decades. I liked the time. I take that forward into the Dutch house, but I don't do it in a linear way for two reasons. Time doesn't seem to exist in a very linear way. Again, it's going back to Tavia and the friendship of my childhood and how when I'm with

her, the past and who I was and who she was so incredibly present. Yesterday, her dad died two weeks ago and she gave me this portrait of herself that he had hanging up in his house the whole time I've known them since I was seven. And now I have this photograph of my little friend, you know, at six, as who she was, as who she is. Those two things are so present, who she is at our age, who she is then, they both exist. And so that's kind of how I move back and forth in time in a novel. It's the same way I do it in my life. Which actually feels like a nice place for us to come full circle as we spent a nice bit of time together already today. And we're sitting in this really interesting, weird time where I think you went, you're experiencing it very differently than a

lot of people also. In this container of the Good Life Project, which now extends from New York to Nashville, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? This right now, right this moment with you, it actually makes me want to cry. I mean, it's so true to live a good life is to have your eyes open and see who's in front of you and feel the enormous good fortune of this second, no matter what, we are alive. And I'm grateful and grateful to you really for taking this time. It's been such a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment

that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com. Or just click the link in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app

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See you next time. Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun.

On January 24th. Tell me how compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th... Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot?