How a near-death NZ experience inspired US writer Ann Patchett’s novel Whistler

Ann Patchett tells Noelle McCarthy how her latest book had its beginnings in a Te Anau glowworm cave.

A few years ago, I spent a couple of hours with Ann Patchett in a hotel in Auckland. We ate pistachios and when I said goodbye to her, I felt a weirdly intense wrench. 

Apparently it’s not unusual to feel a deep parasocial connection to the American author – ask her and she’ll tell you she’s like Taylor Swift for middle-aged white women readers. In person she’s very similar to the voice on the pages of her award-winning books: funny, dry, grounded, a trademark mix of kind and unsentimental. Tender. 

I interviewed Ann Patchett for my new Substack, Tell It Slant, and asked her about the New Zealand experience that inspired her latest novel, Whistler.  

Here’s an excerpt (edited for clarity):

Noelle McCarthy: I trace so much of this book back to the essay you wrote in the New Yorker [about visiting the glowworm cave in Te Anau]. Do you think it's fair to say that Whistler comes from this near-death experience in New Zealand? 

Ann Patchett: It's so funny because I loved (loved!) New Zealand and I had so many people say to me, "Write a New Zealand novel". And in a very, very strange way, I did, because of that experience I had in the cave. That happened, and a year later, I wrote that essay. It was percolating the whole time in the back of my head, but I was writing a different novel that wound up failing, and I threw it away. And as soon as I threw it away, I thought, "Well, I'm going to go write that essay about New Zealand. And it was in writing that essay that I thought, oh wait, wait, wait, wait! Now I know what I want to do, which is write a book about my friend Jim Fox. 

Jim had died just before I came to New Zealand, and he died on his 85th birthday, which, I always like to say, was not a tragic death – it was a death in its proper time, sad, sad, sad though it was. And when I wrote that essay about the dreaded glowworm cave in Te Anau, Jim made a little appearance in the essay. And then I thought, “Oh look at this! I can write Jim's voice. I can get Jim's voice on the page, and it just sounds exactly like Jim. And I'm going to write a whole novel using Jim's voice, using that tremendous love we had. Where does the love go when the person you love dies? What do you do with all that love and that happy back and forth and back and forth? And I thought, I'll put it in a novel. 

NMC: I'm conscious there may be people who haven't yet read your New Yorker essay (it's paywalled). For their benefit, would you encapsulate the existential journey you had in that cave in Te Anau? I don't want to spoil the piece for people but…

AP: I  don't think you could spoil an essay. We didn’t die. That would be the spoiler. 

So, my husband and I were travelling with [New Zealand author] Meg Mason and her husband Andrew Mason. When the time came to go to this cave at 10 o’clock at night, and you had to drive to the dock and get on a boat and go across a lake, I was really the only one who wanted to go. Meg wanted to go a little. The husbands did not want to go, but they said that they would, and we all went. And New Zealand, not to denigrate a beautiful country, but you all have a bit of an earthquake issue, and you go into this cave, it's a hole in the ground that is narrow and low, and there's one way in and there's one way out. And you crawl into the hole, and you go quite a ways down and down because you want to see these glowing worms, and you get in a boat that is in a freezing-cold rushing river in the pitch-black dark, and it is pulled on a chain by a wisened old man, who I don't believe they've let up above ground for decades. People must just bring him a sandwich every now and then, and he pulls the boat on a chain, and in the in the dark in the freezing water, and you look at these worms, who are vomiting up tiny strings of bile in order to catch insects to eat, and they turn out not to be worms. They're maggots, they tell you…

NMC: Meggits, as Meg says..

AP: Yes. So why would you not be thinking of death, right? It is a reasonable thing to think about in the circumstances. In the dark with the meggits, and if the Earth's plates shift incrementally, you are never coming back up again. You will be buried there, and I had an existential crisis that was actually very sad. I was thinking not of the death of my beloveds, I was thinking of my own death, and how super sad that was going to be. And then I came up and the next day – this is what makes the piece complete – the four of us went to the Milford Sound, and we had to go through the tunnel that goes straight down [The Homer tunnel] and Meg – she had no sympathy for my existential crisis – but the very next day she had her own existential crisis as we were plummeting to the bottom of another dark hole, which New Zealand seems to be famous for, and saying “we’re all going to die in here”.

NMC: You told her a story about a famous kea, and that sort of helped, didn't it? 

AP: Yes, I did. 

NMC: You told her the story of Sally, a world-famous kea, and people can discover that when they read the essay. 

But, there was one detail in there, that I noticed actually – I don't think those caves would have been discovered by Māori 2,000 years ago as you say, because Māori didn't come to New Zealand until maybe more like the late 1200s. The fact checkers at the New Yorker missed that one, and they’re supposed to be terrifying. 

AP: You know, in the contributor's note to that piece they said that I was the author of Tim Lake. [Patchett’s novel, a New York Times #1 Bestseller is called Tom Lake.] It was David Sedaris who told me. And he said, "You know, Tim Lake – isn't that one lake over from Tom Lake?”

You can watch the full video interview on Substack or listen to Tell It Slant wherever you get your podcasts.