Tom Lake
Tom Lake
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Ann Patchett on Tom Lake
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A play she never stopped readingThe seed of the novel predates the pandemic, the Michigan setting, and even the characters by years. Patchett had been returning to Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town,’ the one-act play in which a young woman named Emily is granted a glimpse of her ordinary life after death, since her mid-teens, and each return taught her something new about attention and loss. The attachment eventually generated a premise she couldn’t let go.
Every part of the story changed except the connection to ‘Our Town.’ I’ve gone back to that play my entire life and it always teaches me something. The play was the constant for me.
The premise sharpened into a story during the Dutch House book tour, when Patchett stayed with her friend Katrina Kenison in Peterborough, New Hampshire, the very town where Wilder wrote much of ‘Our Town.’ Kenison asked what came next, and when Patchett mentioned a vague idea about a woman shaped by playing Emily in a summer production, the conversation cracked open. Kenison had wanted that same role as a girl, been cast as the smaller part of Rebecca instead, and had fallen in love with the boy who played George. The story Patchett thought she had suddenly became someone else’s lived experience, and that convergence told her she was onto something real.
And as soon as she started saying this, I was like, oh man, this is the story. It’s the story about how you fall in love in this crazy way over the summer, how you fall in love while you were in a play. [paraphrased from audio]
From that conversation in Peterborough, the novel’s shape was fixed: a mother, her daughters, a summer theater, and the question of what a person’s earlier life looks like to the people who only know her now.
Once Patchett knew the emotional territory, she also understood what structural problem the pandemic had unexpectedly solved. She had already planned for three daughters to come home to a family farm before COVID arrived. What she needed, for the novel to work, was a reason they could not leave.
If there’s any element I love in a novel, it’s that the people are trapped and they have to stay put and they have to work out their problems. [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
Treadmill, cherries, and braided timeThe northern Michigan setting was not researched from a distance. It arrived by accident two decades earlier, when Patchett’s publicist routed a Bel Canto book tour stop to McLean & Eakin, an independent bookstore in Petoskey: fly to Detroit, take a commuter plane to Traverse City, drive two more hours, do one event, then reverse it all the same day. Patchett’s initial reaction was not gratitude. What followed, though, was a friendship with the Norcross family who owned the store, repeated visits, and a cup of fresh cherries eaten in the Traverse City airport on the way home that reframed the whole detour.
I sat in the airport and ate cherries and thought, this is the best thing that’s ever happened. I became friends with them. I went back to visit them all the time. And so suddenly, I was hanging out with the cherry crowd.
The Nelson farm’s physical details in the novel are drawn specifically from the Wunsch farm near Traverse City, and Patchett’s friend Erin Whiting, who had grown up on a cherry farm and later founded a professional theater company, served as her guide to both worlds the book required.
She wrote the entire manuscript on a treadmill desk she had owned for ten years and used only for email. Starting ‘Tom Lake,’ she tried it for fiction for the first time. The practical effect went beyond posture: the physical rhythm of walking gave the work a quality of entry and exit that sitting at a desk had never provided.
It did wonders for my concentration. I felt like I was stepping into the novel every day, and when I finished work I stepped out of it. I think that walking occupies the restless part of my brain.
The novel moves between Lara’s present on the farm in 2020 and her past at the summer theater called Tom Lake in the 1980s, and Patchett knew that readers in a dual-timeline novel tend to race through whichever strand they like less. Her solution was structural: the daughters in the present keep interrupting their mother’s telling, pulling the narrative back into the farm before it can settle too long in the past.
So you sort of braid, braid the time. Because I think that that’s what life is like. Time is, in fact, braided. [paraphrased from audio]
When the book was finished, Patchett discovered she had written something other than what she intended. The desire to produce something joyful had been genuine, and the orchard setting and family warmth were real. But distance from the draft revealed a layer she had not consciously put there.
I thought, oh my gosh, I really want to write something joyful and fun. And finally, I’ve done it. And by the time I got to the end and got some distance from it, it actually is also a sad book in a lot of ways, which I think I didn’t realize so much when I was writing it, but both things are really true. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
The life a parent never shows youPatchett does not have children, a fact she has written about directly elsewhere, and the novel’s central situation, a mother narrating her pre-motherhood life to the daughters she is raising, required her to imagine across that gap rather than draw from it. What drew her to the premise was not autobiography but a question about knowledge and privacy that she found genuinely unresolved.
I was struck by the realisation that we don’t really know what our parents’ lives were like. We may have an idea, a story we pieced together, and believe those are the facts — but they’re not.
The framing of what Lara withholds from her daughters became important to Patchett well before publication. An interviewer described Lara’s omissions as secrets, and Patchett pushed back on the word, drawing a distinction that sits at the ethical core of the novel. The correction is not semantic. It redraws the boundary between a character’s obligation to others and her ownership of her own experience.
A secret is something that you are pointedly not telling someone, but something that’s private is just yours. It just belongs to you. And something happened to Lara, and it was her own business. She tells the reader, but she doesn’t tell her husband. And she doesn’t tell her girls, and that’s her right.
What she wants us to sit with
Paying attention before the moment is gonePatchett’s author’s note directs readers back to Wilder, but the invitation is not simply literary. The argument of ‘Our Town,’ that a life is built from ordinary moments and that most people only recognize them once those moments have passed, is the argument she wanted the novel to make in its own right. She has described her own habit of reaching for the play in moments of restlessness as a way of reorienting herself toward what is already present.
I just reach for it without even thinking, I’ve got it by my desk. And when I think, oh, there’s something else I want. I want a different kind of life. I want a different outcome. I want to do these things I haven’t done before. And I look at ‘Our Town’ and I just think, no, this is it, this is today, this is this beautiful, beautiful life that I have. And the trick is just whether or not I can be aware of it.
The steady love between Lara and Joe is, in Patchett’s view, almost absent from fiction, not because it is rare in actual lives but because it produces no narrative tension. She wanted it on the page precisely because its quietness makes it invisible to storytelling conventions that require conflict to generate interest.
That kind of love isn’t represented in literature. It’s the kind of love that my friends have for the most part. But you don’t ever see that. [paraphrased from audio]
The novel takes place during the COVID pandemic, when the wider world is in genuine crisis. Lara, picking cherries with her family on the farm, is genuinely happy. Patchett wanted those two facts to coexist without one canceling the other, and she wanted readers to recognize the coexistence as normal rather than as a contradiction that needed resolving.
There’s a lot to feel terrible about, but there is also so much joy, and there’s so much to feel good about. And you can hold those two opposite things. We all do every single day. We hold those opposite truths.
The novel does not ask readers to choose between grief and gratitude. It asks them to notice that they are already holding both, whether they intend to or not.