Later, she tells me that when people tell her how much they love her books, “I’m smiling, and I’m grateful, but I almost don’t know what they’re talking about. “All right, here we go,” and Patchett heads out to the floor to sign four copies for her fan.

One of the clerks pokes her head around the door and tells Patchett that there’s an Australian fan here who would really like to meet her. She leads the way to the offices at the back, where young women work with dogs at their feet and on their laps. If you do, I will hunt you down and smack you around.’ Somehow,” she adds with a grin, “Ann Patchett can say that in a way that your regular bookstore owner can’t.” When customers visit the bookstore and tell her Amazon is cheaper: “I’m like, ‘You cannot come in, soak up what we have, talk to the staff, get recommendations, then go home and buy the book on Amazon. “I feel that writers are treated like orchids: they keep us in the hothouse, they mist us and attend to our every need, but if this system is going to work, if we are going to survive, we need to come out of the hothouse and take responsibility for ourselves and for the health of the industry.”

You cannot come in, then go home and buy the book on Amazon. She has since become a rallying voice for independent bookstores. In 2011, she founded Parnassus Books, an idyll in a strip mall, with her business partner, Karen Hayes. What do you do when the bookstores in your hometown all shut down? If you’re Patchett, you open one yourself. Patchett climbs every mountain, but she will also mutter an occasional, and deliciously un-nun-like, “fuck!” To watch her in action is to hear the Mother Abbess from The Sound of Music singing, “Climb Ev’ry Mountain”.

She exudes that sleeves-rolled, get-on-with it capability, paired with the clarity and occasional ferocity of true righteousness. Even if she hadn’t published an essay, “The Mercies”, about her schooling with the Sisters of Mercy, you might guess that Patchett had been raised by nuns. Today, the good that Patchett will do involves picking up a journalist from Nashville’s airport and devoting her whole day to zipping around town in her little silver Prius, showing said journalist her world.

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