# Ann Patchett on the friendships that made her

> The bookstore owner and novelist has spent her life writing about female friendship, and living it.
- Title: Ann Patchett on the friendships that made her · Woman's World
- Summary: The bookstore owner and novelist has spent her life writing about female friendship, and living it. Patchett treats friendship as the great love story of a…
- Keywords: ann patchett, friendship, memoir, writers, books, Ann, Patchett, friendships, made, Woman's World
- Source: Woman's World — https://womansworld.com/entertainment/celebrities/ann-patchett-friendships-about-the-authors-closest-bonds
- Author: Julianne MacNeill
- Published: 2026-09-15T13:14:43+00:00
- Read time: 2 min
- Topics: ann patchett, friendship, memoir, writers, books
## Friendship is her subject
Patchett has written some of the rawest friendships in modern fiction and memoir. Much of it comes straight from her own life.
## All about female friendship
Girls' school for 12 years, then Sarah Lawrence with about a dozen male students. Her mother, grandmother, sister and girlfriends are the center of her life.

> I am all about female friendship. It's been the specialty of my life.
## Love without the burden
She sees friendship as an unburdened love story, the place where the messy, unfiltered version of you gets to show up.
## Do you want to be my friend
In 1990, at a Provincetown arts fellowship, Patchett knocked on apartment doors looking for a friend. Three or four went unanswered before Elizabeth McCracken opened hers.

> I said, 'Do you want to be my friend?' I was pathetic, I mean, 'Do you want to go have ice cream?'
## Ice cream and Kevin Costner
They drove to Ben and Jerry's and bonded over a shared dislike of Kevin Costner. It was the start of a decades-long friendship.

> We drove to Ben and Jerry's and discussed our mutual hatred of Kevin Costner.
## Each other's first reader
Patchett and McCracken became each other's trusted manuscript readers. Patchett taught her to drive; McCracken watched her write her first novel.
## Still showing up
The friendship kept growing through both careers, including McCracken's support when Patchett opened her Nashville bookstore, Parnassus Books.
## Lucy, huge and permanent
Patchett and Lucy Grealy became roommates in Iowa City in 1985. They had overlapped at Sarah Lawrence without ever meeting.

> I only remember that she came through the door and it was there, huge and permanent and first.
## The friend she lost
Grealy, who wrote Autobiography of a Face, carried chronic pain and trauma from childhood cancer. She died of a heroin overdose in December 2002 at 39.

> We were better off when we were together.
## A coat and a conversation
In 2017, waiting to interview Tom Hanks, Patchett complimented the peony-embroidered coat worn by his assistant, Sooki Raphael. A letter-writing friendship grew from it.

> Such a beautiful coat, I said to her.
## Lockdown in the basement
When Raphael joined a Nashville cancer trial, Patchett put her in the family's basement apartment instead of a hotel. COVID turned a short stay into months.

> Everything was tremendously present tense for Sooki. We were living exactly in the moment.
## Key takeaway

Patchett treats friendship as the great love story of a life, which is why her closest bonds keep turning into books.