Words by Ann Patchett
Photos by Emily Dorio
April 2, 2023
Sweet Bitter Southerners,
I'm thrilled to wish a happy 10th anniversary to this organization that so nobly represents us, and to have been asked to write the Letter From Home, which has gotten me thinking about where my true home is. It begins with a story about a friend of mine, a successful novelist, who recently confided in me his despair at the thought of writing more novels. “People don’t read them,” he said, meaning books in general. “Even when I get together with other novelists, we wind up talking about Netflix.”
I told him he was hanging out with the wrong novelists, or the novelists were hanging out in the wrong place. All you have to do to convince yourself that literature is alive and well is to go to a bookstore.
A year after the last independent bookstore in Nashville closed in 2010, I opened Parnassus Books. It had never been my dream to own a bookstore, but I didn’t want to live in a city without one. I’d grown up in a bookstore, after all, which is not to say I slept on a cot beneath the new-releases table, but in the upheaval that was childhood, a store called Mills became my permanent home. I can scarcely conjure a single room in the series of crummy duplexes we moved between in those years, but more than half a century later, I can walk through that bookstore in my mind: the window display and the checkout counter; fiction to the right, nonfiction to the left, children’s in the back; the wire rack of newspapers and the three chairs where customers sat to read those newspapers. After school, my sister and I would walk to the nearby pet shop to admire puppies, then go to Mills to admire books. We did this for years. I was known by the booksellers there, as people remember a small girl in her Catholic plaid coming in to study the jackets of the Kristin Lavransdatter series. The comfort of that store, the consistency, cannot be overstated in the making of the person I became. I wanted to be a writer so that some part of me, hopefully, the best part, would be in a bookstore all the time.
I told my novelist friend who fears that no one cares about novels that there are people waiting for us to unlock the doors every morning when we open. They ask for recommendations and make recommendations to us. They come to meet their friends or sit in a chair with a shop dog in their lap, reading. They come to the author events and book club discussions, they bring their children to storytime. The bookstore is where they bring their family and friends who’ve come from out of town. Our customers are in and out of Parnassus so regularly that many refer to it as their second home.
Can a bookstore be a home? There are children who grew up here, sitting in our tiny pastel chairs, first being read to, and then reading themselves. Children who started out in the picture book section, then moved on to chapter books, middle grade, graphic novels, and young adult fiction. They apply for summer jobs in high school. They dust and shelve and offer suggestions to customers (who like buying children’s books from actual children).
If you want to live in a world full of readers, you have to raise those readers up.
Because while bookstores are wonderful and necessary harbingers of community, their main purpose is as a book dispensary. Books can be small, portable homes, where you can slip away to rest or be thrilled or moved, entertained, educated, enlightened. A book can scare you or make you swoon, keep you up half the night or lull you to sleep. A book can show you the world. Come in and we’ll help you find what you’re looking for, or find what you never knew existed. Books and bookstores twined together will always be home to me, and I am not alone in this. People come in all day long to tell us they’re home, and so we welcome them like family.
Come visit.
— Ann Patchett
Ann Patchett is an internationally best-selling and PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author. She is the owner of Parnassus bookstore in Nashville, and a recent recipient of The National Humanities Medal. Patchett is the author of eight novels and four books of nonfiction. Her ninth novel, Tom Lake, will be published in August. Signed copies can be purchased here.
Emily Dorio is a Nashville-based photographer and director with a global point of view. She has produced advertising campaigns and editorials for both national and international brands, including Ralph Lauren, The New York Times, Condé Nast, Meredith Media, Abrams Books, Clarkson Potter, SoHo House, and Marriott Bonvoy. Her work has been featured in GOOP, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, InStyle, and Architectural Digest. Emily’s photography career began in Athens, Georgia, with photography projects for renowned chefs Peter Dale and Whitney Otawka.
Read this and more amazing stories in Issue No. 5 of The Bitter Southerner magazine, available when you join at the $50 annual level or the $5 monthly level, or above.