Enn Petchett

Patchett was born in Los Angeles, California. Her mother is the novelist Joan Ray. Her father, Frank Patchett, who died in 2012 and had long since divorced her mother, served for 33 years with the Los Angeles Police Department and took part in the arrests of Charles Manson and Sirhan Bishara Sirhan. When she was six, she moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where she still lives. Patchett says she loves her home in Nashville, her doctor husband, and her dog. When asked where she would like to go, she always answers, “home.”

Patchett attended St. Bernard Academy, a private Catholic girls’ school run by the Sisters of Mercy. After graduating, she studied at Sarah Lawrence College and took classes in fiction writing with Allan Gurganus, Russell Banks, and Grace Paley. Later she attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she met and became friends with Elizabeth McCracken. It was there that she wrote her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars.

In 2010, after learning that there was no longer a good bookstore in their hometown of Nashville, she and Karen Hayes opened Parnassus Books together; the store opened in November 2011. In 2012, Patchett was included in Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. She is a strict vegetarian “for both moral and health-related reasons.”