The award-winning novelist and memoirist, author of the brand-new collection of writings, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, and owner of Nashville’s beloved indie bookstore Parnassus, opens up to Biographile about the public role of a writer, and about tempting fate with a title, in the first part of a two-part interview.

BIOGRAPHILE: In your introduction, you present the book as a serendipitous, almost accidental collection of your nonfiction essays. Do you now see a larger story unfolding through these different stories -- a thematic through-line?

ANN PATCHETT: Oh, absolutely -- I think I was being cavalier [in the introduction] because it took me two years to do it. My friend Niki Castle put it together and then I kept going through and taking out the pieces that I thought were weak and writing something else to build a narrative arc. Then I would read it through again, and something that had seemed really great two or three readings ago now seemed weak, because I kept upping it, kept pulling things out. If it works the way I want it to work, it’s a book about the things that I am deeply committed to: the things that I am, in a sense, married to. Not just my husband -- family, friends, dogs, art, work, bookselling. The things that I wouldn’t give up.

BIOG: So the title, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, is bigger than just the one essay that shares it. When did that emerge as the title for the book?

AP: It was fairly late in the game. On one hand, speaking as a bookseller, it’s a great title. Garrison Keillor was reading at the store last night, and he asked me about the title, and I said it. He looked up and he just looked so shocked, and said, “That’s a great title. It’s fiction, right?” I cracked up and said no, and he said, “That’s terrifying.” And that’s sort of how I felt about it. It’s a great title but it was so scary to me, because it’s as if I’m saying, “My children are beautiful, and they love me, and they get good grades, and they don’t smoke crack” -- it’s just a really bad idea from a personal point of view to call a book this, because it’s like inviting the evil into your life. Once I decided to call it that, every time my husband and I had an argument I would say, “Oh, this is great, I’ve got a book coming out in six months called This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, and look at us now!”

BIOG: You have at least until the paperback version comes out ...

AP: That’s right! “This was the story of a happy marriage.” Only have to change two letters.

BIOG: It’s how literary titles tend to go -- you’re waiting for the ironic twist.

AP: If nothing else, it’s a title that will make people go to the book and say, “What? What’s that about?” And that’s what you want.

BIOG: There are so many ways it can be read -- it brings up ideas of what marriage is, how a happy marriage is different, and what happiness is.

AP: There’s a picture of me on the back of the book, which is something I normally object to, but it’s in the bookstore, and it’s me sitting in this sea of books. There are boxes of books all around, and there are books up to the ceiling, and I’m quite small -- and I really like that, because if you picked the book up and turned it over you’d think, well, wait, is she talking about being married to books? And in a way, I am.

BIOG: I wanted to ask about the challenge in nonfiction of deciding what’s private and what’s public. I found the stories about your public engagement as a writer so striking, particularly about opening the bookstore, and around the Clemson speech and controversy. [In 2006, Clemson University in South Carolina assigned Patchett’s book Truth and Beauty, the story of her close friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy, to the incoming freshman class, and invited the author to give the convocation address; Patchett found herself subject to a protest and smear campaign by “concerned” locals and parents who objected to the book.] Do you find it harder to write about yourself in these public roles, where it’s not just your story that you’re telling?

AP: No, I don’t -- in fact, I’d never even thought of it. When I’m writing about opening the bookstore, or about Clemson, I’m really writing about how I am feeling in that experience, so it doesn’t register as different than when I’m in the nursing home feeding my grandmother.

BIOG: The bookstore story in particular is about becoming aware that suddenly you’re the face of something. It remains your perspective, but it brings up an interesting question about the public role of the writer.

AP: It’s true, because I am telling stories in which I’m in front of an audience, and a lot of other people are viewing me as these things are happening, but that doesn’t change my personal experience in the moment -- I’m just in it. I’m also viewing myself with a certain amount of detachment, as the person that these things are happening too, but it doesn’t change me as a person. No matter what’s going on, we’re still just seeing the world with our own two eyes.