Growing up, Ann Patchett dreamed of becoming one thing, and one thing only, a writer.   “I wrote and read and read and wrote, ” she observes in the current edition of The New Yorker.  She didn’t like sports. She didn’t like clubs. She didn’t like socializing. She liked books, reading them and learning how to write them.   She fulfilled her dream.  Her  many books, like Bel Canto and The Dutch House, have become both critical and commercial successes.

Yet for all her acclaim as a writer, her father Frank never believed in her as a writer, and told her so, explicitly, painfully, and repeatedly.