Free This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett Page B

the pages. There were about four hundred of them, and I felt considerably taller. I went out and found Elizabeth in the yard hanging her laundry on the clothesline, and I told her I was done and we hugged and made a lot of noise and went off for a drink in the middle of the day. Because Elizabeth had read every chapter as I wrote it, and because I took all of her suggestions and did my revisions along the way, I was able to straighten up the manuscript fairly quickly. Writers handle the process of revision in as many different ways as they handle the writing itself. I do a great deal of tinkering, but I never make any structural changes—putting in a different narrator, say, or giving the main character a sister. Elizabeth will do such major rewrites from draft to draft that every version could exist as a separate book. We both get to the same place in the end. One method of revision that I find both loathsome and indispensable is reading my work aloud when I’m finished. There are things I can hear—the repetition of words, a particularly flat sentence—that I don’t otherwise catch. My friend Jane Hamilton, who is a paragon of patience, has me read my novels to her once I finish. She’ll lie across the sofa, eyes closed, listening, and from time to time she’ll raise her hand. “Bad metaphor,” she’ll say, or, “You’ve already used the word inculcate .” She’s never wrong.
    Back in Provincetown, that April, I finally had my book but was missing a title to go with it. I had had a title while I was writing it, and it was so bad that lo these many years later I still cringe to admit to it: The Luck You Make . Not long before I finished the book I was talking to my mother on the phone one night and she asked me to tell her again what my title was. And so I did. “What?” she said, long distance. “ The Lucky Mink ?” Once your own mother has called your book The Lucky Mink , you pretty much have to throw the title out.
    After that I was at a complete loss, and then a friend told me to come up with ten titles. “Do it fast,” she said. “Don’t think about it too much.” She said to type each title on a separate sheet of paper, and underneath type, a novel by Ann Patchett . I was then to tape them all to the wall. Every evening, in those last weeks at the Work Center, I invited the other fellows over to pull a single title from the wall and throw it away. It was my one attempt at participatory installation art. At the end of the ten days the only title left was The Patron Saint of Liars, a novel by Ann Patchett , so I went with that.
    When the fellowship was over on the first of May, I packed up my manuscript and drove away. I cried all the way to the Sagamore Bridge. I knew I was leaving behind one of the greatest experiences of my life. I will forever miss what I had there: the endless quiet days, the joy of living a hundred feet from my new best friend, the privilege of getting to stay inside the fog of my own imagination for as long as I could stand it without anyone asking me to come out. It might not have been a realistic life, but dear God, it was a beautiful one.
    W hen I was twenty, I published my first short story in the Paris Review . An agent had called me soon after and asked to take me on as a client and I said yes, though I didn’t have another story that was any good at all. Now, seven years later, I arrived from Provincetown at her office in New York with my novel in a box. I had borrowed money to make the drive home to Nashville, but I wasn’t in any hurry to get there. My agent told me that the market for first fiction wasn’t what it used to be. (Note: this is what agents say. It’s probably what Scott Fitzgerald’s agent told him when he brought in This Side of Paradise .) “But I’m young!” I said cheerfully. (Note: young is always in fashion for debuting novelists. I was