Over the next five decades, she follows the ebb and flow of their lives, and that of their parents, through distress, divorce, love, hope and the tragic death of one of the children. “Here was the most remarkable thing about the Keating children and the Cousins children: they did not hate one another, nor did they possess one shred of tribal loyalty,” writes Patchett. Before the party is over, Bert and Beverly would kiss and the boundaries of their lives would dissolve in ways they could never have imagined.Īs Bert and Beverly move to Virginia, with Beverly’s daughters Caroline and Franny in tow, and Bert’s children - Cal, Holly, Jeanette and Albie - as visitors every summer, the six children settle down to an uneasy alliance. At this party, deputy DA Albert Cousins will show up uninvited to escape his increasingly large family - three children and a fourth on its way - and meet his host, cop Fix Keating and his ravishing wife, Beverly. in the Sixties with a christening party that will change the lives of two families.

I wanted to be able to move through time and between characters, and that was easier when I could look at the chessboard and say, “OK, I’ll put this weight on my sister and this weight on my stepbrother, and I’m going to move them around.Who would we be if it weren’t for the moorings - or unmoorings - of our family lives? How would we have turned out if our parents had decided differently - chosen another course for our lives or for themselves? Would we have unravelled at the seams, undone by actions we did not fully comprehend, or lived a fuller, more satiated life? Ann Patchett’s poignant new novel, Commonwealth, opens in Torrance, Calif. I had more confidence in a larger structure once I could use real people-not as characters but as chessmen. Operating off the timeline of my experience and family made that much easier.

These books were getting claustrophobic, and so I was very interested in writing a book that covered more time. Bel Canto is about suspension of time and takes place over four months Run takes place in 24 hours State of Wonder takes place over three months. One of the things I’m obsessed with in all my books is time, and I felt that time in my work was contracting. Was it freeing to write so close to home?Ībsolutely. Or, as my mother would say, “None of it happened, and all of it is true.” The vast majority of the emotions the characters feel in Commonwealth did happen to me.

Lily Meyer: How much did you borrow from your own family to write Commonwealth?Īnn Patchett: The vast majority of the things that happened in Commonwealth did not happen to me.

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