MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
When Tayari Jones and Ann Patchett get to talking, it can be hard to get a word in edgeways. The two women are writers. Their latest books - "Kin" for Jones, "Whistler" for Patchett - are two of the biggest, buzziest novels so far this year. Now, these two women are also friends, pen pals, swapping letters back and forth about their lives, how the work is going. I got to sit down with both of them on Saturday on stage at the Library of Congress National Book Festival. Here's a taste of that conversation, which flowed from love to undergarments to the similar ways they think about writing characters. Over to Tayari Jones.
TAYARI JONES: When I'm writing a novel, I spend so much time with those characters.
ANN PATCHETT: That's right.
JONES: I don't want to spend time with people with - for whom I have contempt, right? So I only write characters that I understand their point of view. I may not agree with their actions, but I understand why they do it, and I can see a road to redemption for each. And that's just the way that I am as a person. I think it's the way that...
PATCHETT: Right.
JONES: ...I am as a writer. And I think that is the way you are as a person...
PATCHETT: Right.
JONES: ...And as a writer, and it shows in the work. I feel like it's very rare that I have read a novel and met the author, and I couldn't square them. I feel like people show who they are through the worlds they create.
PATCHETT: Yeah.
KELLY: Here's another thing that y'all seem to have in common with these books, which is neither of these books, "Whistler" or "Kin," are the books that you set out to write. Ann, you have talked about how you were writing another book for - what? - like, a year?
PATCHETT: Mm-hmm. It was bad.
(LAUGHTER)
PATCHETT: It was really bad. And I had been working on it for such a long time and thinking about it for such a long time. And my husband wanted to go on a trip, and I said, I've got to figure out my book. Take your sister. He and his sister went to Paris, and they were going to be gone for 10 days. And on the second day, I was like, oh, I know what's wrong with this book - everything.
(LAUGHTER)
PATCHETT: It cannot be fixed. And I threw it out. And then I just immediately had an idea for a novel.
KELLY: OK, same question to you, Tayari, because you - this is your first book since "American Marriage" in 2018. But you were working on one about - what? - gentrification in the modern South, and you worked on it for how long?
JONES: I was trying to write a novel - I had a - it was my first time really writing a novel that I had pitched as an idea. I write about the urban South because I feel like most Southern novels are about the rural South, and I wanted to write about, you know, Atlanta, this Southern city that is my home. And so I wanted to write something really contemporary. And I was working on it, and I was working so hard. Ann knows. I wrote letter - wrote her letters about it.
And the novel wasn't noveling. Like, it just wasn't - the - it wasn't - it didn't pop, right? I felt like I was working with a hammer and nails and saw, and I was making noise when I should have been making music. It just wasn't doing whatever that thing is that makes - how you know when you're making art. And after working on it for, you know, quite a few years, I realized what was wrong with it was everything.
And I just went back to the basics, like writing like I wrote as a child, in a spiral-bound notebook, you know, with a pencil. Not even a pen. A pencil. And I just kind of scribbled just to see, you know, what was on my mind, what was in there. And it's the first time I've had the experience of feeling like I met my characters. And I was quite surprised to discover that they were living, you know, in the '50s. So instead of me kind of saying, what is the story I'm trying to tell? I had to say, what is the story trying to tell me?
KELLY: How did you know they were in the '50s?
JONES: What they were wearing.
PATCHETT: (Laughter).
JONES: The wildly oppressive undergarments of the '50s.
(LAUGHTER)
JONES: Like, the underwear? Oh, my God. Like, whatever you have on right now - just quietly assess what you have on right now.
(LAUGHTER)
JONES: Whatever you have on right now, somebody in the 1950s thinks you are naked.
(LAUGHTER)
PATCHETT: Can I ask you a question?
JONES: I'm not telling you what I have on.
PATCHETT: OK.
(LAUGHTER)
PATCHETT: OK, so we write letters. And you've recently started upping your game to a point that I find threatening...
(LAUGHTER)
PATCHETT: ...Because you are painting your own greeting cards. Let's just table that for a second. But when you were working on "Kin," and even when you finished it, you were saying, oh, they're going to be disappointed. The people who I sold this idea to, they're not getting that idea. The people who read "American Marriage," they're not getting - they're going to be disappointed. This book is so fabulous. I mean, this is really the book of the year for me.
(APPLAUSE)
PATCHETT: But I wonder, like, at what point did you wake up to what you had done? Because you were short-selling yourself through the writing and even when you were done - to me, one correspondent.
JONES: Well, I was just so glad to finish it. And, like, I felt like I was in a restaurant, and they had ordered the pasta, and I was serving them the steak. Like, this was not what they had ordered, what they had asked for, what they had paid for. I had already spent these people's money.
PATCHETT: OK, that's a perfect example.
JONES: I had already spent these people's money.
PATCHETT: Wait. No, that's a perfect example. They ordered and paid for pasta, and you gave them steak.
(LAUGHTER)
JONES: Well (laughter)...
(APPLAUSE)
JONES: And so I just, like, I felt like I just turned it in and ran out of the room. I didn't even tell them that it was something different. I was just like, here it is. And they even told me - they said that they - the lady who was reading it, and she said - she told her assistant, pull up that contract. I don't think this is the thing.
(LAUGHTER)
JONES: But it was what I had. And I was writing it after 2020, after the pandemic, after the summer of George Floyd, when so much was going on - when I was questioning, why are we doing this writing thing? Like, what is it we're trying to accomplish in this writing thing? And I had to kind of surrender to art, surrender to creativity and to creation. And I didn't have confidence that it would be a great book, but I had a certain serenity in that I have given all I have.
KELLY: Do you ever feel like, oh, man, does this feel beside the point when there are so many fights to fight in real life?
PATCHETT: Every Sunday morning, I talk on the phone with my friend Kate DiCamillo. You should be jealous.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Woo.
PATCHETT: And we, a couple of years ago, were having that conversation. I was saying it doesn't make any sense. Why am I writing a novel? And she said, why don't you call your friend Renee Fleming and tell her not to sing? And I think of that every time.
KELLY: All of you, thank you. Happy book festival, Ann Patchett...
JONES: Thank you.
KELLY: ...Tayari Jones.
PATCHETT: Mary Louise Kelly.
(APPLAUSE)
PATCHETT: (Laughter) Thank you.
KELLY: Ann Patchett and Tayari Jones on stage with me at the National Book Festival, a celebration of books, including their latest, titled "Whistler" and "Kin."
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