‘I now care so much less about what people think of me – it’s freeing’

Ann Patchett is loved by readers for her sharply observed insights on relationships. As she publishes her 11th book, The Dutch House, she talks to Joanne Finney about family, inspiration and ageing

Where did the idea for your new novel, The Dutch House, come from? It actually came from a conversation I had with author Zadie Smith. I own a bookshop [Parnassus Books in Nashville] and I was interviewing her when her novel Swing Time came out. I was talking to her about the fact that it’s autobiographical; the characters grew up in the town where she grew up, the parents in it are like her parents. She said,

‘It is autobiographical, but I’m not the daughter, I’m the mother. I’m writing the mother I don’t want to become with my children.’ And that was the moment I thought, ‘Aaaah! Oh, I want to write a book about the stepmother I don’t want to be!’

Did being a stepmother yourself – and also having a stepmother – make this book difficult to write?

It’s funny, but I don’t think of it as a book about step-families. I think this is really a book about a brother and a sister. My stepmother is visiting me right this minute and she is my favourite person in the world. I’m always trying to be as good a stepmother as she was to me and live up to her example. When I started dating my now-husband, Karl, his children were 15 and 18 and their mother was alive and a wonderful person. So it wasn’t like I was ever trying to be ‘mother’, but it’s a very tricky road to walk.

What’s a typical writing day like for you?

There isn’t one, really. As far as novels are concerned,

I make up a book in my head, think about it for a long time and squint at it. Then the very worst part is when I feel like I have it all set and I sit down and start to write it. I hate that. And then I’ll work for, I kid you not, 10 minutes a day. I just cannot stay in my chair! But it’s like exercise, you work up and you work up and you work up. By the time I was finishing The Dutch House, I was working 14 hours a day.

Is there something that particularly inspires your writing?

I have a quote from F Scott Fitzgerald on a Post-it note by my computer. It says ‘I want to write something new, something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned’. I love the idea that something could be beautiful, simple and intricate at the same time.

You wrote in your essay The Getaway Car about making peace with the idea that what you write is never going to be as beautiful as it was in your head. How do you reconcile that?

It’s not that I think I do bad work or I’m disappointed in myself, I’m not. It’s just that when it’s in my head, it seems so impossibly complex and then when I write it’s so simplistic. I read what I’ve written and think, ‘Oh, God, a 10-year-old could have done this.’

Do you approach writing fiction and non-fiction differently? For me, fiction is so hard and non-fiction is easy. With non-fiction, it’s happened, so I know who the characters are, what the story is, what the arc of the narrative is going to be. I just need to pick the part where the action begins and where it ends. With fiction, you don’t have anything when you start and the possibilities are endless. You are God, you are making the world.

Have you ever got it wrong?

In this most recent book, I made the wrong decision and I ended up throwing most of what I’d written away and starting over again. I’ve never, ever done that before. It was horrible.

What’s the best thing about being in your 50s?

I care so much less about what people think of me and it’s so freeing. You do want to say to people, to young people in particular, ‘Turn your eyes away from the mirror and look up.’

The Dutch House (Bloomsbury, £18.99) by Ann Patchett is out now