I was in downtown New York on September 11 with a friend and we were there at the World Trade Center when it fell. Yes, I think that memory is almost a living thing for every person.
Do you think memory is ultimately unreliable? The novel is also about memory: whether we can only ever view the past through the prism of the present. I am somebody who feels the burden of things. I hadn’t consciously set out to explore that and yet the further along I went the more I could see it and the more I could think about the burden of things. Was that something you set out to explore? Property is both a sanctuary and a burden in the novel. I see people doing that and I just think, You can’t still be feeling this loss. Danny and Maeve chew on their loss of the house: they make it a fetish. It becomes their defining feature in life. So many people just get stuck in their childhood and shoulder that burden through everything. Do you think people too often get fixated on the past? The protagonists in The Dutch House become obsessed with their childhood home after they’re turfed out by their stepmother. Her new novel, The Dutch House, is a masterful depiction of ruptured family relationships, the power of sibling bonds and the nature of home. She has also written celebrated works of nonfiction, including This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, and co-owns a bookshop in her home town of Nashville, Tennessee. Bel Canto(2001) won the Orange prize, the PEN/Faulkner award and was a finalist in the National Book Critics Circle award. A nn Patchett is the author of eight critically acclaimed novels, including State of Wonder and Commonwealth.
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