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Ann Patchett finds bits of Catholicism and America appalling: 'But I am those things'
Ann Patchett says she was closer to her Catholic faith when she was in her mid 30s and writing Bel Canto.
Emily Dorio
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Emily Dorio
A note from Wild Card host Rachel Martin: Ann Patchett is a hugely popular writer. She was a Pulitzer finalist for her book The Dutch House. Her most recent novel, Tom Lake, was a New York Times bestseller. But she’s perhaps most well known for her 2001 book Bel Canto.
It tells the story of a group of strangers taken hostage somewhere in Latin America. It’s lyrical and heartbreaking and it has been adapted into an opera and a movie. Overall, it’s been a massively successful book. And Patchett recently decided to do a fascinating thing: She published an annotated version of Bel Canto with her own handwritten notes in the margins.
She calls out clunky turns of phrase, confusing plot points, repetitive language. She also gives herself credit for good writing and thoughtful observations about the human condition. But mainly, she is owning her shortcomings. Which feels like a bold quality that we need more of.
This Wild Card interview has been edited for length and clarity. Host Rachel Martin asks guests randomly-selected questions from a deck of cards. Tap play above to listen to the full podcast, or read an excerpt below.
Question 1: What’s a place that shaped you as much as any person did?
Ann Patchett: When I was a child, we lived on a farm for several years. It was in Ashland City, about 30 minutes outside of Nashville. It was not a working farm. It was just a collection of absolute weirdness.
We had a couple of horses. We had a rabbit. We had chickens, which were all named after members of Nixon’s cabinet. We had dogs, which meant that dogs would just go through and they would stay for a couple of years. Same with the cats. It was real country life. And most importantly, I had a pig, which I got from my ninth birthday because I was obsessed with Charlotte’s Web.
It was just a very animal-laden, isolated life. And because I’m an introvert, that worked out fine for me. And childhood was: you would go outside and climb up a hill. I collected moss, lots of flowers. I actually had a moss business. I sold moss in town when I was about 10 to florists.
Rachel Martin: Wait, other kids are like selling lemonade and little Ann Patchett is like, “Some moss, sir?”
Patchett: I’m in the moss trade. Make a lot more money off a moss than you do lemonade, Rachel.
And I remember my mother saying things like, “Remember the rattlesnakes are blind when they’re molting. So if you get into the blackberry bushes where the rattlesnakes go to shed their skins because they have those little tiny thorns on the blackberry bushes, just be aware because they can’t see you so they’re more likely to strike.”
That was the bedrock advice of my childhood.
Question 2: What’s an expression of love you’re trying to get better at?
Patchett: Complete acceptance. Complete blanket acceptance, which is the love my husband gives to me. He just accepts me for who I am. Always. No matter what. And I think I’ve always been somebody who wants to fix, and I work very hard to not fix and to just see the people in my life and accept them for who they are and love them for who they are.
The trailer for the film adaptation of “Bel Canto.”
YouTube
Martin: Is this right — that you dedicated the original version of Bel Canto to the man who is now your husband and you weren’t married, you were just dating?
Patchett: Yes. Yes! What kind of madness was that? And I want to tell you – my second novel, which was a book no one ever read called Taft – I dedicated it to my boyfriend at the time. And I found out that he was, shall we say, stepping out on me as the book was going to press. And I frantically called my publisher and said, “Can you pull this?” And they were like, “Hang on, let me check. Yes! We got it back!”
Martin: It’s like you stopped the tattoo artist right as they were about to go into your arm to put his name.
Patchett: It’s so true. And I dedicated it to my beloved cousins. And I thought, “Never gonna make that mistake again.” But then I met the right guy and I dedicated the book to him. And we weren’t married because I didn’t want to get married, but I knew that I would always be with him.
Question 3: How have your feelings about God changed over time?
Patchett: So there’s a lot about God in Bel Canto. There’s a lot about faith. And one of the things that I found very moving when I went back to it was I was much closer to my Catholic faith when I was 35 or 34, when I was writing that book.
You know, it’s a two-part thing. There’s God and then there’s Catholicism, which I always say, Catholicism is to God what sorority is to college. For some people, it’s everything. For some people, it’s nothing. For other people, it’s part of the experience.
I still believe in God. And here’s the thing, if I tried to tell you what that meant, I would be wrong. The only thing that I know for sure is that whatever I know is wrong. And it does not behoove me to spend a moment’s time thinking about it.
We are alive and that’s an astonishing gift. And it seems very possible to me that being alive is God and that the trick is whether or not we know it. The trick is whether or not we can keep our focus and remember that we are, for all of the suffering, the recipient of the most beautiful gift for a limited period of time, which is our life.
Martin: I’m interested in your preservation of the word “God” to define that. That the word carries so much for me because of how I was raised. And so it feels very dramatic for me to say, “I don’t believe in God.” But I guess I appreciate that you, even though you are no longer a Catholic and don’t identify that way —
Patchett: Yes I do. I don’t go to church, but I do still call myself a Catholic.
Martin: But that’s even more interesting!
Patchett: I am still a Catholic and there is an enormous amount about Catholicism that I don’t believe and am appalled by. I am still an American and there is an enormous amount about being an American that I don’t believe in and that I am appalled by. I am a Tennessean. There is an enormous amount about being a Tennessean that I don’t believe in and I am appalled by. But I am those things. And there are – about all of those things – parts that I love and I’m proud of.
When I was a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence, I had a humanism teacher. We had a class called “Humanism.” And it was a point in my life where I thought, “I loathe Catholicism. I want nothing to do with this. This is just an anathema to everything of who I am and who I believe in, what I believe in.”
And I went out to dinner at the Raceway Diner, I remember, in Yonkers with my humanism teacher. And I told him my problems. And he said, “If you’re going looking for something as big as God, just go where you’re comfortable. Go with what you know. It doesn’t make any difference. You’re not going to pick a better religion. You’re not going to pick a better set of words. It’s not about the words. It’s not about the religion. Don’t waste your time picking out your luggage. Just go on the trip.”
What matters is that we do our best with the life that we have, that we show up, that we love each other, and that we try to be as aware as is humanly possible of the life and the gift that we’re given, and to help other people wherever we can.
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
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When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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