Bestselling author and bookseller Ann Patchett reflects on creativity, love, marriage, and the enduring power of human generosity, sharing why she remains hopeful and continually finds evidence of kindness in the world.
Ann Patchett is the bestselling author of ten novels, including Bel Canto, Commonwealth, The Dutch House, and Tom Lake, the co-owner of Parnassus Books, and the recipient of numerous literary honors. She joins live at the TED Conference to discuss the creative process, the lessons she’s learned from love and marriage, and why she continues to find evidence of generosity and hope everywhere she looks.
Ann Patchett
2026 is the best year I have seen for fiction since I opened the bookstore 15 years ago.
Curtis Fox
From The TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, we’re featuring a conversation Debbie had with Ann Patchett at the TED Conference in celebration of Ann Patchett receiving the 2026 TED Winning Trailblazer Award presented by Pivotal.
Ann Patchett
The secret to happiness is low expectations.
Curtis Fox
Ann Patchett is a novelist and a bookstore owner. Her nine novels include Bell Canto and The Dutch House, which was a finalist for the Politzer Prize. Her 10th novel, Whistler, was just published by Harper Collins.
Debbie Millman
I was struck by the fact that when you interviewed Tom Hanks in front of a live audience, right before you took the stage, you whispered to him that you didn’t have any questions planned and you were just going to wing it. He then immediately shared this with the audience and everyone laughed. I gasped out loud when I read that because I’m probably most known for how long it takes me to create and craft my questions in advance of every interview. So as I take out my notes, I hope you won’t think less of me for doing that.
Ann Patchett
Can I tell you why I do that?
Debbie Millman
Yes.
Ann Patchett
Alan Alda.
I interviewed so many people at Parnassus and I interviewed Alan for a book he wrote that was called If I Knew What You Were Saying, Why Do I Have This Look On My Face? It’s a really hard title. But Alan was the person who taught me that you have to do all the preparation, research, write the questions, throw it out, walk on stage and be fully present. And he completely changed my life when I read that book and when I interviewed him. And so that’s what I said to Tom and then Tom mocked me when we went out on stage, which was fun.
Debbie Millman
Well, I’m going to aspire to be the kind of person that can just throw caution to the wind and maybe when I interview you next, I can graduate to that level.
Ann Patchett
Or when I interview you, that’s when we’ll do it.
Debbie Millman
Okay. So my first question, is it true that you read in bed at night with a flashlight?
Ann Patchett
It’s not a flashlight and it has everything to do with when I go to sleep or when Carl goes to sleep. But at the bookstore, we sell something that is like a 15th generation itty bitty book light and it’s got a rubber eyes neck and it plugs into your computer and it’s so great because I am 62 and my eyes aren’t what they used to be and I need a really bright light. Sometimes in the middle of the day I use it just because I like a really bright light on the page.
Debbie Millman
I was talking to a friend of mine who’s here tonight, Tanya Salvaranthem, and she told
Ann Patchett
I love her and her coach.
Debbie Millman
Yes.
Ann Patchett
Yes.
Debbie Millman
She forwarded me an article that you had written about two years or so ago that I reread and remembered quite vividly about how adamant you’ve been about not owning a cell phone. And in an essay in the New York Times titled The Decision I Made 30 Years Ago that I still regret, you stated this, “My stepfather had made my mother carry a pager when I was growing up and when it beeped, she had to find a payphone and see what he wanted. What he wanted was to know where she was and a bad habit that intensified after cell phones came around. Yet the regret that you shared in the essay was that you signed up for email in 1995 and have pretty much regretted it ever since. I’m curious as to how you’re feeling about it now two years later. Do you still …
Ann Patchett
I regret email really passionately right now because of my experience with TED because I have never seen an organization that puts out email quite like TED. And they have a … Do you know the thing on the back of your badge is a tracker? It really is. That’s not a joke. So yeah, it’s a lot of connection, maybe more connection than I was looking for, but yeah. I mean, I’m having a wonderful time. I really have enjoyed this very much.
Debbie Millman
One thing that you wrote in that essay was this. You said, “People with smartphones look at me as if I’m the last of the carrier pigeons.” And as somebody that has been studying branding and marking and making for my whole career, I wanted you to know that back in the 1800s, late 1800s, carrier pigeons actually delivered messages faster than the railroad.
Ann Patchett
I would have existed right in that place, right in the place of the carrier pigeon. It is a really strange thing because not having a cell phone makes me feel like I’m in a zombie film, but I’m the only one who’s not dead.
Debbie Millman
Yeah. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
Ann Patchett
Some days I’m not sure it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but the farther I go down the line and I will say I have a flip phone. It’s a burner. I pay once a year and actually it’s really funny because inevitably when I turn it on, I don’t have service anymore because I haven’t used it in the last year and Cricket comes on and says, “You have to put at least $10 on your account before we can put your call through.” And I don’t know what the number is. So that exists, it’s in my sock drawer. But no, the farther I go down this road, the more I believe I made the right decision.
Debbie Millman
You also don’t have any social media, but do record absolutely wonderful videos for your bookstore and you share recommendations for books with your adorable dog, Sparky.
Ann Patchett
Oh no, Sparky’s dead.
Debbie Millman
Oh.
Ann Patchett
No, no. Sparky’s been dead for a while and it was horrible, but Nemo is now the very cute dog on the videos.
Debbie Millman
I’m sorry.
Ann Patchett
No, that’s all right.
Debbie Millman
Sorry to bring up a bad, okay. Yeah. Okay. In one video you shared two books that had come out in the same week about Waco, Texas.
Ann Patchett
Yeah.
Debbie Millman
In that video you said that every writer has a recurring nightmare.
Ann Patchett
Right.
Debbie Millman
What is yours?
Ann Patchett
Oh, that’s interesting. Well, it certainly isn’t that I was going to publish a book about Waco when two other books came out about Waco. I think my recurring nightmare is just plagiarizing myself and finding that place and coming to terms with it. For example, I have a book coming out on June 2nd called Whistler and there are so many things in that book that I have written about before. There are things that I have written about in nonfiction that are in that book as fiction and I really struggle with that. They were the right decisions for the novel, but then I think, “Oh, are people going to think that I’m plagiarizing myself?” The thing that I would most like to talk about all night long is how much I love Yiyun Li. And Yiyun’s last book was called In Nature Things Merely Grow. And there was a quote in that book that said, “Do what works.
What works for whom? What works for you? ” And I typed that out and I put it on my desk lamp and every time I would think, “Oh, I’ve already done that before.” I thought, I just don’t care. If it’s right for now, I’m going to go ahead and use it. And while I have your attention, because I like to make predictions, Yiyun Li has a book coming out on October 15th. This is the curse of my life owning a bookstore. Everything I read isn’t coming out for six months. So I’m going to say this and hopefully it will lodge in the back of your mind. It’s called Music Against the Night. I think it’s the best contemporary novel I’ve ever read in my life. And if that book doesn’t win absolutely everything, I can’t imagine. It is beyond belief how good that book is.
Debbie Millman
Is it a novel?
Ann Patchett
It’s a novel.
Debbie Millman
I think that it’s going to be a really rough season between Min Jin Lee and Yiyun Li because-
Ann Patchett
No, it’s not. No. Have you read?
Debbie Millman
I’m in the middle of reading Min Jin’s book and-
Ann Patchett
Just you wait.
Debbie Millman
Okay.
Ann Patchett
Okay. 2026 is the best year I have seen for fiction since I opened the bookstore 15 years ago.
Debbie Millman
So why do you think that is? Is it about something about this moment in time?
Ann Patchett
No, its just the way it’s a deck of cards and that’s the way the card shuffled. Tayari Jones, Kin, Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine, mother of God. I don’t know if you’ve read the first two novels in the Harlem Shuffle series. And those are my favorite books of his. I’ve read everything Colson has written. Cool Machine I don’t know. It’s unbelievable. Maggie O’Farrell’s, Land, Douglas Stewarts, John of John.
Debbie Millman
Is everybody getting this?
Ann Patchett
Yeah.
Debbie Millman
Okay, good. We’ll have to send out a book list.
Ann Patchett
It is just a spectacular Emily St. John Mandel in September Exit Party, spectacular fiction coming down the pike.
Debbie Millman
I want to talk a little bit about your writing.
Ann Patchett
Why?
Debbie Millman
Because it’s exquisite. And it deserves to be talked about, especially tonight.
Ann Patchett
Thank you.
Debbie Millman
You’ve written that before you can start writing a novel. You have to know how it ends. How do you know where it begins?
Ann Patchett
It begins in the moment that the action begins.
Debbie Millman
Does that come to you? I know that you open the windows and you sort of wait for things to come in, but talk about when you recognize if you recognize the moment you know you have an idea that deserves to become a novel.
Ann Patchett
The idea comes and I don’t take notes and I don’t write it down and it changes and it changes and it changes. I have a book in my head right now that began on the idea of a young man who marries into a family because it’s the father of that family who he loves. I don’t mean that romantically, but I have in my life seen that several times. The young man, it’s not even that he wants the business, he wants to be part of this life, this family. So that was the idea. Now it’s a young woman who stands in for somebody who’s missing at a wedding and winds up ultimately with the groom going into that family. But it’s like a year of thinking, but wait, no, what if he’s actually her? And what if she’s part of the wedding party, but she doesn’t know?
What if somebody fell? I mean, that is the dialogue. What if the bridesmaid’s dress shows up years later? I’m just saying this stuff, but you may pick up a book a few years from now and be like, “God, she mentioned a bridesmaid’s dress that night in Vancouver.” That’s so weird.
Debbie Millman
You’ve also said that one of the last things you understand when you’re putting a novel together is the structure of time.
Ann Patchett
Okay. The structure of time is the most important and interesting thing to me in a novel, both a novel that I’m writing and a novel that I’m reading. And so it is usually the last thing that I figure out. Is it linear time? Does time go back and forth? Are there parallel tracks of time? How do I manage time? How does another writer manage time? In the Emily St. John Mandel book, I’m assuming most of you read Station 11. Station 11 is the living embodiment of the kind of book I don’t want to read, but I own a bookstore, so I read it and I thought it was brilliant. Same thing with Exit Party. If you read The Jacket Copy and it says, “This book begins in 2031 after the American Civil War and I want to throw it through the window.” But it’s Emily St. John Mandel and I know she’s brilliant, but the book takes place in two universes in which everyone has a double and history is played out in a different way.
There are so many people doubled in this book and yet at no moment was I lost.
Debbie Millman
That’s a feat.
Ann Patchett
So many people and they each have different names but the same face and they’re like 30 main characters in each universe. I always knew where I was. I knew what she was doing. She’s completely in control because she’s brilliant. And when somebody makes me overcome the thing that I am inclined to dislike in a novel, wow. I love that. But that is an extreme example of someone who is playing with time going back and forth, but brilliantly.
Debbie Millman
Do you still learn from other writers?
Ann Patchett
Obviously that was what I just said.
Debbie Millman
Sort of like Malala yesterday with Chris Anderson.
Ann Patchett
No, but yeah, that is exactly what I’m doing. I’m learning from her and I’m also seeing what is possible. I love writers. I always think of Hanifah Durakeep, who I have the maddest crush on. But when I read his books, if it’s his poetry, his essays, his memoir, I’m always reading thinking, I didn’t know you could do that. I didn’t know that writing could be that thing. Have you ever had Hanifah here to your list. Add that name. I’ve actually never met him.
Debbie Millman
I have. He’s exactly what you would think he would be. Divine.
Ann Patchett
Divine.
Debbie Millman
Yeah.
Ann Patchett
I mean, he
Debbie Millman
He really is. He and Jason Reynolds like hall pass.
Ann Patchett
Oh. Yeah. Yeah.
Debbie Millman
I want to talk about love. We don’t have a lot of time together.
Ann Patchett
But we have enough time to talk about love.
Debbie Millman
Yes.
Ann Patchett
Okay.
Debbie Millman
In your book of essays, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. You wrote this about you and your sister. We weren’t the products of our parents’ happy marriages. We were the flotsome of their divorces. In the house of my mother and stepfather, my sister and I were the spoils of war. You go on to write about how after your first marriage ended in divorce, you were adamantly opposed to marriage and it wasn’t until your husband Carl faced a potentially life threatening issue that you changed your mind and you wrote this about the experience. The fact that we came so close to missing out, missing out because of my own fear of failing makes me think I avoided a mortal accident by the thickness of a coat of paint. We are on this earth so incredibly small in the history of time in the crowd of the world.
We are practically invisible, not even a dot and yet we have each other to hold onto. That deserves a round of applause.
Ann Patchett
Yeah.
Debbie Millman
So my question is this, what surprised you most about getting remarried?
Ann Patchett
What surprised me most about getting remarried? I can’t even say that I got remarried because I was married for a year when I was 24.
Debbie Millman
Practice marriage.
Ann Patchett
I just don’t think that. I feel like I just got married. So what surprised me most, Carl and I dated for 11 years and we didn’t live together. We lived about a mile apart from each other. We dated for 11 years before we got married and I absolutely knew that I would stay with him until one of us died. I mean, I was completely committed. I just didn’t want to get married again. But when we did get married again … No, when we got married, it was like buying a house and you found out there were all these other rooms. We had been together for 11 years and loved each other completely and were committed to each other, but when we got married, there was an expansion and what I realized is that because I wouldn’t get married for those 11 years and Carl really wanted to get married, I’m talking about you like you’re not here.
Debbie Millman
Oh, over and over again. He knew after your second date.
Ann Patchett
But I think that Carl always thought that I wouldn’t marry him and he was holding something back.
Debbie Millman
I know.
Ann Patchett
So that when we got married, I got everything and it was an amazing wedding present. But I also will say that had we got married before we did get married, we might not have made it because we had so much space to … If we had a bad fight, it was just like, “Okay, goodnight. I’m going home. Goodnight. I’m going home.” We didn’t ever have to think, “Oh, should we get divorced? This is a terrible fight.” We got married at the point at which I knew no matter what we will not get divorced. And somebody said to me once, I was having dinner with a group of women and she was like, “But what if you find out he’s a serial killer?” And I was like, “That’s just not going to happen. There isn’t anything that will end this except death.” And that was the only condition under which I would ever get married again.
You want to hear a great story?
Debbie Millman
I’d love to.
Ann Patchett
Okay. I was with Kate DiCamillo a couple of weeks ago in Minneapolis. No, we were in DC and then we went to Minneapolis. We were in DC. She was giving the wealthy lecture. I was doing the introduction and we had a film crew from PBS because they were doing a Southern storyteller series on the two of us and we each had our own cameraman and my cameraman was Anthony and at the end Kate has this giant signing line and Anthony and I are talking and he says that he tells me he’s getting married in a couple of weeks and he’s a lovely, lovely guy. And I’m saying, “Oh, congratulations. That’s so wonderful.” And he said, “Do you have any advice for me? ” And there are a whole bunch of people standing around. I was like, “Oh, that’s sweet.” And then I was like, “Oh my God, I have advice for you.
“Joint finances down to the last dime you have because you don’t know what could happen and she may lose her job and you may get sick. And Carl and I got joint finances. Maybe we’d been married two years before we went all in and I always think that’s when we got married. Every single thing I have is yours. Every single thing you have is mine. No net, none. That’s love for me. Other people, everybody gets their own definition, but for me, for him, that’s what it is.
Debbie Millman
There is actually something else. What? Which you’ve said, which when I read, I realized you might have been talking about love, but for me, you were talking about what your work does to others. So I want to read this to you because it was something that your friend Edra had asked you when you were in the throes of your divorce and-
Ann Patchett
At 25.
Debbie Millman
Yes. And the question was about your first husband, does he make you a better person? And he didn’t. And so when she asked you about Carl, does he make you a better person? You wanted to tell her, yes, with the full force of his life, with the example of his kindness and vigilance, his good sense and equanimity, he makes me a better person, and that is what I aspire to be. Better and no, it really isn’t any more complicated than that.
Ann Patchett
That’s right.
Debbie Millman
That’s what your work does to people. It makes us consider how we can be better people. I’ve been living in your work now for the last month in addition to having read it earlier before. And every time I came away from reading one of your short stories, one of your essays, one of your books, I came away thinking I feel like a better person having read this and I want to thank you for that.
Ann Patchett
Thank you.
Debbie Millman
I want to ask you one last question, which isn’t really my question. This is a question that Roxane, my wife, likes to ask writers that she loves. And I said, “Can I ask Ann this question since it’s really your question?” And she gave me permission.
Ann Patchett
And I love her
Debbie Millman
So this is a question from both me and Roxane. What do you love most about your work and how you create it?
Ann Patchett
That I get to do it. What an insane privilege that I get to write and it really means everything’s good. I have food, I have health, I have shelter, I am safe, I am not scrambling and I get to make art. And this was my dream. The secret to happiness is low expectations and all I ever wanted in my life was to write and to be able to take care of myself in the very smallest way off of writing. And I never updated that dream. I never wished for anything beyond that in my work that I get to do this, that you would read it and apply your big brain to it is astonishing. I am the luckiest person in the world. I’m going to just twist a little bit here because a lot of that last TED session was just a giant bummer.
If not me, if I’m not happy, I don’t know who the hell is. And I get a lot of grief. People say, “Oh, she’s a Pollyanna. She’s so unrealistic. Her characters are so nice to each other.” And I think if I wrote about serial killers, you would never say this, you don’t know any serial killers. I look at the world through the eyes that I have and I see so much kindness in every direction horror in the news, but open up the front door, people are so kind and generous and they care and they listen and they take care of one another and the more you see it, the more you see it. And I just feel like I’ve got to stand up for that, for the love and for the goodness and for all of the generosity that people show me every minute of my life, all of it.
And so that’s what I want to write about and that’s what I want to get down in books.
Debbie Millman
And that’s why you make us better people for having read the work. Ann Patchett. Thank you.
Ann Patchett
Debbie.
Debbie Millman
Thank you. Thank you. Congratulations on receiving this wonderful TED Trailblazer Award.
Ann Patchett
Thank you very much. Thank you, all of you. And as somebody who interviews people for a living, gosh, you’re good at this. Thank you.
Debbie Millman
Did somebody get that on tape?
Ann Patchett
Thank you. Thank you,
Curtis Fox
The interview took place on April 14th, 2026 at the TED Conference in Vancouver. You can watch Ann Patchett’s TED Talk about the love of her life on Ted’s website. Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.