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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read?

Hello, and welcome to Bookworm.

I'm Michael Silverblad, and today my guest is Anne Patchett.

She's the author of Belcanto, the most recent of her novels. It's published by Harper Collins.

Her previous books include The Magician's Assistant, Taft, and the patron saint of liars in reverse order.

And one of the things I like most about her novels is that they seem to be about ways in which families get reinvented or rebuilt, reshaped, reoriented.

And I wanted to begin immediately, almost, by asking you how that came to be

such a persistent concern. It's the thing that's always interested me. I have a lot of people

who will say that my book seemed to have been written by four different people. And I

always say, no, in fact, I just write the same book over and over again, and I probably always will.

Describe the book that you write over and over again. A group of strangers are thrown together

by circumstance and somehow form a family. That's my tagline. I could have it tattooed on my arm.

And I think that that's probably half of Western literature. If that's my theme, I'm not going

to get in too much of a rut as long as I always find very, very different people and emotional

circumstances for them to live in. Now, it seems to me that there is also a certain Midsummer Night's Dream quality to the books

that allow these reformations to occur.

And what's more, it isn't the case that most of these characters,

there's one or two exceptions,

...