I felt a kinship with Ann Patchett early on in her career when I read somewhere (after the success of The Patron Saint of Liars) that she had waited tables at the T.G.I. Friday's restaurant on Elliston Place in Nashville, Tennessee. I, too, had waited tables at Friday's, though not in Nashville. But, hey! We both waited tables at Friday's! And I'd enjoyed many a happy hour or late-night drink with friends at the Nashville Friday's in the early '80s. This tenuous link made me curious to read Patchett's first novel. Patchett's writing has kept me reading ever since.

Ann Patchett was born in 1963. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and was a Bunting Institute fellow at Radcliffe. She has written for various magazines including Seventeen, Elle, GQ, The Paris Review and Vogue. Her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, was the only first novel chosen in 1992 by the American Library Association's Notable Books Council as one of the best works of fiction of the year. Patron Saint was also chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Taft won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Patchett lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Candace Moonshower: When we began the interview process, you mentioned that you have just completed your latest novel. Congratulations! How do you look at the finishing of a book? Do you feel differently now about the end of a novel than you did the first time, with The Patron Saint of Liars?

Ann Patchett: There are so many steps in finishing a book. There's the day I write the last page. Then I go back and re-write the end several times, then I start to re-read and change things, then I send it to Elizabeth McCracken and add in her changes, then my agent, then my editor, who may or may not want changes. I suppose a book is done when it is typeset, or maybe after that. It's done when I can't make changes anymore. Right now my editor has the book, but I think it's finished. I had so many people go over this one. It still does feel like it did with Patron Saint, that moment of typing a last line, stumbling away from the computer. It feels a little bit like walking away from a car crash, all of life and all of death in a minute.

CM: Were there any finished – or unfinished, for that matter – novels before The Patron Saint of Liars? What had you published before submitting it?

AP: Patron Saint was the first novel I wrote. I did try to write an inter-connected collection of short stories before that, but I was unhappy with the way it turned out and threw it away. I wrote/published a lot of short stories before I wrote novels, something I don't do anymore.

CM: Have you ever written – or do you plan to write – books in any other genre?

AP: I suppose it's possible that I would write a book of nonfiction, but the other genres that interest me right now are plays and screenplays. I've just written two screenplays.