Hey, it's Empir's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. It is the dog days of summer. It's hot and sticky. And it's a time of year I associate with summer stock theater when a bunch of people, often young 20-somethings, spend this summer getting together somewhere relatively cool, maybe Vermont, maybe

upstate New York, and put on a bunch of plays. It's a grueling schedule. You're grinding out

weeks of 14-hour days, if not more, and you're working with the same crew of people day in and day

out. It's one of those pressure cooker environments that has a way of heightening everyone's emotions all of the time,

which means it is the perfect setting for a novel.

And Patchett's fabulous 2023 book, Tom Lake, is set in part during a summer stock theater season.

And when she talked to NPR's Mary Louise Kelly when the book came out,

Patchett talked about the kind of guys you meet in such places in your early 20s, who may not be husband and material, but sure are a lot of fun. That's ahead.

The writer, Anne Patchett, does not have children. This is by choice, and being a writer, she has written about her reasons.

I have just enough energy to write, Patchett says. Keep up with the house, be a decent friend, a decent daughter, and sister, and wife.

Part of not wanting children, she goes on, has always been the certainty that I didn't have the energy

for it and so I had to make a choice, the choice between children and writing. Patchett's new novel

is about a woman named Laura, who is many things, but at the core, a mother. The book is titled

Tom Lake. And Ann Patchett, I am so glad to speak with you again.

I am so glad to speak with you, Mary Louise. So this book, your book, unfolds during that surreal

summer of 2020 when so many grown-up kids were moving back home, moving back into their childhood bedrooms,

and Laura, the mom, and your narrator, she is loving having her 320-something daughters back home.

Why put that mother-daughter relationship at the center of your story?

Well, I know it was true for so many of my friends that they were saying, oh, the pandemic,

it's terrible, it's horrible.

I'm so glad my kids are home.

Yeah.

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