Ann Patchett was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, where she still lives. She studied writing at Sarah Lawrence College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and while she was working on her first novel she supported herself by waiting tables, a job she has written about with great affection.

Her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), is set in a home for unwed mothers in Kentucky. Her fourth, Bel Canto (2001), made her famous. Partygoers at a birthday celebration in an unnamed South American country are taken hostage, and over the long weeks that follow, captors and captives are drawn together by the voice of a great opera singer among them. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award and Britain’s Orange Prize. The Dutch House (2019), about a brother and sister exiled from their childhood home, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

She is also a fine essayist. Truth & Beauty is a memoir of her friendship with the poet Lucy Grealy. This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage gathers pieces on writing, work and love, including “The Getaway Car,” a short, practical account of how she writes that many writers keep close at hand.

Then there is the bookstore. In 2010, Nashville lost its last two large general bookstores, and a city of hundreds of thousands of people had nowhere to browse for a new book. The next year Patchett and a partner, Karen Hayes, opened Parnassus Books, an independent shop in a strip mall. It became a destination, with a shop dog wandering the aisles, and Patchett became one of the most visible champions of independent bookselling in America, writing and speaking about why physical bookstores still matter to the life of a town.

She once described the gap every writer knows: the beautiful book you imagine and the flawed one you actually write. Her advice is to forgive yourself for the difference, and write it anyway.