It’s always fun to take a walk down Memory Lane. But, you know, not too far down.
At least that’s what Ann Patchett believes—and she definitely thinks you would, too.
The latest book from Patchett, who comes to Santa Cruz High on Monday, Nov. 18, as part of Bookshop Santa Cruz’s author event series, is This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, a collection of memoir-style essays that stretch back through her career as a magazine writer—beginning early in her career, when, as she puts it in the book’s introduction, her short stories and novels “were no more capable of supporting me than my dog was.”
But, again, not too early.
“None of the really early pieces are in the book,” says Patchett. “The stuff from Seventeen and Bridal Guide and most of the fashion magazine stuff I left out, and readers should be grateful.”
Though the essays—not to mention previous books like 2004’s Truth & Beauty: A Friendship—prove that Patchett has a lot of experience with memoirs, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage has an elegant symbiotic relationship with The Getaway Car, Patchett’s excellent treatise on writing from 2011. The latter definitively chronicles her life as a writer, while the former shows how that creative vision interlocks with her personal life.
According to Patchett, however, this was simply a happy accident.
“I didn't think of them as companion pieces, but I got the two assignments to write very long essays at about the same time, and I knew I wanted to write pieces that would serve as anchors for the book, which I suppose is another way of saying that they are companion pieces, but I wasn't thinking of them in that way,” she says. “I was well into the project of putting together a book of nonfiction pieces before I decided to write The Getaway Car. The impetus for doing the book was my friend Niki Castle, who is mentioned at a couple of different points in the book. She was the one who first put a manuscript together. It wasn't the manuscript I wound up using, but she definitely got the ball rolling.”
The title would suggest the book is focused specifically on her relationship with her husband, in the same way that Truth & Beauty chronicled her incredible friendship with Lucy Grealy. But this time, the relationship is just a core around which so many other stories swirl. The essays go into depth about her childhood, her family and even her dog.
In the course of putting the collection together, Patchett had some revelations about her writing. For one thing, she adapted well to the wildly divergent demands of the market.
“I was always very good at writing in the style of the magazine, no matter what the magazine was,” she says.
But there’s also a consistency and an intimacy to these essays that makes their authorship unmistakable.
“As I got older,” says Patchett, “I pretty much kept my own voice no matter what.”
And there were revisions to be made, of course—and entire remakes.
“I changed some, and left others alone,” she says. “‘The Wall’ is about five times longer than it was when I published it in The Washington Post Magazine. I had so much great material and now that I had the space to use it, I was going to get it in. ‘My Road to Hell Was Paved’ was published in Outside as a piece about Winnebagos. I rewrote it to be a piece about what was really going on when I was on assignment. ‘How to Write a Christmas Story’ was two different Christmas essays that I joined together.”
There were also little details, like in the speech she gave at Clemson, when she talked about students using MySpace.
“Does anyone use My Space anymore? I changed it to Facebook.”
Ann Patchett will read and sign her new book on Mon, Nov. 18, at 7pm at Santa Cruz High. The $30.45 ticket includes book. [Editors Note: An earlier version of this story listed Patchett's appearance as Nov. 8 in error.]
