Kate’s 2¢: “Run” by Ann Patchett
NOTE: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as, describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ shares her thoughts about what she’s read. In her opinion…
Susan McInerney did a good job of narrating this intriguing story. BookShare™ has an excellent synopsis of the blended family saga.
A few take aways:
–There was no one else who was willing to be crushed by the heavy mantel of his expectations.
-The sick were a ferocious lot. They would walk right through you if they thought that help was on the other side.
–The belief that the next generation would carry your work forward.
–If a person was willing to go through so much to give you what she thought would be a better life, it was the least you could do to look happy.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ann Patchett is an American writer, born December 2, 1963. In 2002 she received the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction for her novel Bel Canto.[1][2] Patchett’s other novels include The Patron Saint of Liars (1992),[3] Taft (1994),[4] The Magician’s Assistant (1997), Run (2007),[5] State of Wonder (2011), Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023).[6] The Dutch House was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[7]
Biography[edit]
Ann Patchett was born on December 2, 1963, in Los Angeles, to Frank Patchett (a Los Angeles police captain who arrested Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan[8]) and Jeanne Ray (a nurse who later became a novelist).[9] She is the younger of two daughters. Her mother and father divorced when she was young. Her mother remarried and when Patchett was six years old the family moved to Nashville.[10] She has described her stepfather as a “very, very weird guy” who had her carry a gun as early as age sixteen, and she partially attributes her disinterest in texting to his forcing her mother to carry a pager and respond to him on demand.[11]
Patchett attended St. Bernard Academy, a private Catholic school for girls in Nashville run by the Sisters of Mercy.[3][4] After graduation, she attended Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York.[12][4]
After college, Ann Patchett attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she lived with the memoirist and poet Lucy Grealy. Their time as roommates and their life-long friendship was the subject of her 2004 memoir Truth & Beauty. In her early twenties Patchett married; however, the marriage lasted only about a year.[13]
In her late twenties, Patchett won a fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts;[3] during her time there, she wrote her first novel The Patron Saint of Liars, which was published in 1992.[3][9] In 2010, she co-founded the bookstore Parnassus Books with Karen Hayes, in Nashville. It opened in November 2011.[14] In 2016, Parnassus Books expanded, adding a bookmobile expanding the reach of the bookstore in Nashville.[15] Patchett lives in Nashville with her husband, Karl VanDevender.[16][17]
Writing[edit]
Patchett’s first published work was in The Paris Review, a story which appeared before she graduated from Sarah Lawrence College.[9] For nine years, Patchett worked at Seventeen magazine,[3] where she wrote primarily non-fiction. The magazine only published one of every five articles she wrote. She ended her relationship with the magazine after getting into a dispute with an editor and exclaiming, “I’ll never darken your door again!”[3]
Patchett has written for numerous publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, O, The Oprah Magazine, ELLE, GQ, Gourmet, and Vogue.[12] In 1992, she published The Patron Saint of Liars.[4] The novel was made into a television movie of the same title in 1998.[18] Her second novel Taft won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in fiction in 1994.[4] Her third novel, The Magician’s Assistant, was released in 1997.[19] In 2001, she achieved a breakthrough with her fourth novel Bel Canto, becoming a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist[20] and winning the PEN/Faulkner Award.[1]
A friend of writer Lucy Grealy, Patchett wrote a memoir about their relationship, Truth & Beauty: A Friendship. Patchett’s novel, Run,[5] was released in October 2007. What Now?, published in April 2008, is an essay based on a commencement speech she delivered at her alma mater in 2006. She is the editor of the 2006 volume of the anthology series The Best American Short Stories.[21] In 2011, she published State of Wonder, a novel set in the Amazon jungle, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize.[2][22] In 2016 she published the novel Commonwealth to widespread critical acclaim. Patchett called the book her “autobiographical first novel,” explaining, “The wonderful thing about publishing this book at 52 is that I know that I am [already] capable of working from a place of deep imagination.”[23]
In 2019, Patchett published her first children’s book, Lambslide,[24] and the novel The Dutch House,[25] a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[26] In November 2021, she published These Precious Days, an essay collection. In 2023, Ann Patchett published a novel called Tom Lake, and it made The New York Times Best Seller list.[27]
When asked how to encourage people to slow down and contemplate more during a 2024 interview for the BBC, she responded:[28]
Wouldn’t it be lovely if people sat quietly for longer periods of time?… I do, because I write novels for a living… I’m very, very careful with myself because I don’t want anything to disrupt my ability to concentrate on one thing for long periods of time. To that end, I do not watch television under any circumstances, I do not have a cell phone, and I participate in no form of social media. I have never looked at Facebook. That’s kind of interesting, because my bookstore has a huge social media presence and I make videos about the books that I’m reading, but I never watch them.
Her work has been translated into more than 30 languages.[29]
From NLS/BARD/LOC:
Run DB65494
Author: Patchett, Ann
Reading Time: 9 hours, 45 minutes
Production: National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled, Library of Congress
Read by: Susan McInerney
Subjects: Bestsellers, Family
Boston. African American Tennessee Moser is injured saving one of widowed former mayor Bernard Doyle’s black adopted sons from a car accident. The Doyle boys–Teddy, twenty, and Tip, twenty-one–discover that Tennessee is their birth mother when they take home her eleven-year-old daughter Kenya. Strong language. Bestseller. 2007.
New York : HarperCollins Publishers, c2007.
Take Action On Run
From Bookshare™:
Run
Ann Patchett
9780061796050
2007
Synopsis
Since their mother’s death, Tip and Teddy Doyle have been raised by their loving, possessive, and ambitious father. As the former mayor of Boston, Bernard Doyle wants to see his sons in politics, a dream the boys have never shared. But when an argument in a blinding New England snowstorm inadvertently causes an accident that involves a stranger and her child, all Bernard Doyle cares about is his ability to keep his children-all his children-safe. Set over a period of twenty-four hours, Run takes us from the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard to a home for retired Catholic priests in downtown Boston. It shows us how worlds of privilege and poverty can coexist only blocks apart from each other, and how family can include people you’ve never even met. As in her bestselling novel Bel Canto, Ann Patchett illustrates the humanity that connects disparate lives, weaving several stories into one surprising and endlessly moving narrative. Suspenseful and stunningly executed, Run is ultimately a novel about secrets, duty, responsibility, and the lengths we will go to protect our children.