There is no particular person author Ann Patchett has looked to for inspiration. Instead, she credits her Catholic faith for teaching her a boundless capacity for creativity and appreciation for metaphor. Patchett has harnessed that power to her audience: She is the recipient of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize (2002) and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for her novel Bel Canto, which sold more than 1 million copies in the United States and has been translated into 30 languages.

Her most recent novel, Run, has a suspenseful plot that takes place in the span of one day. Run offers a glimpse into the remarkable ways in which Patchett’s characters are transformed by secrets revealed and by a family’s unexpected circumstances.

Patchett’s insights are also expressed in an essay based on a commencement address she gave at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. What Now? reminds those on the cusp of change that their journey is as important as their destination.

Although she says her readers are the last thing on her mind when writing her stories, the beauty and redemption at the heart of a Patchett book are so captivating, her readers can’t help but feel that she wrote it just for them.

Why do you think Catholics who both adore and sometimes struggle with their faith play such a major role in your stories?
Because I am one, both adoring and struggling. I went to Catholic school for 12 years, and it’s just so much a part of the fabric of my life that I would have a hard time picking it out of things. It’s not that I’m trying to put it into my writing. It’s that I would have a hard time getting it out.

Do you have any special desire for your readers when they come to your stories?
I honestly never write a novel with a reader in mind. I write my books entirely for myself. I don’t sell my books before I write them. I don’t sell them until they’re finished, and for the most part nobody reads them while I’m writing them. It is this very special time where I’m telling myself the story that I want to hear.

In the same way when I cook, I cook the food I like to eat. I’m not a great cook, but I love my own cooking because I cook to my own taste. When I write, I write the kind of story I want to read. I can’t even imagine sitting down and thinking, “I wonder what people would want now? How am I going to make the reader feel now?” I can’t ever fully imagine people reading my books.

But many do!
I wonder if people are buying them and using them as building material or putting additions on their house with them or something. I meet people who tell me my work was so meaningful to them, and I smile and I nod—but I know there’s some way in which I don’t make that fundamental connection between what I do in the privacy of my home when I’m sitting in my study working and what somebody else is doing in the privacy of their home years later when they’re sitting in their study reading.

It would be quite an impersonal thing to be thinking about people you don’t know as you write.

It would make you crazy because you’d have this enormous jury sitting on your shoulder all the time saying, “Now I don’t think I’m going to like it when you do that.”

This very idea might be what’s responsible for so much bad writing and the bad movies that seem so geared toward what audiences may want in a story.
Right, and the question that everyone asked me when I was out on book tour with Run was, “Wasn’t it hard to write a novel after the success of Bel Canto?” And I thought, well, no. Why would I be thinking about what the readers might expect now? Was I supposed to sit down and write another novel about opera and terrorism?It would never occur to me that there was this giant gallery of people looking down on me saying, “This is the kind of story I want to hear.” Writing is a very selfish thing. In the same way if you were a painter, you would paint what you saw, what moved you. You wouldn’t sit there with a paintbrush and think, “I wonder what color her living room sofa is, so I could paint it an orange that would match it just right.” You’d just paint what you feel. You’d paint what moves you.

That seems to be what your readers are hungry for.
Then that’s my happy coincidence, but that’s all it is: a happy coincidence. When we talk in terms of faith, I’m not trying to put a certain message out. It’s more that Catholicism really trained me for fiction writing. I think it has to be the greatest religion for a fiction writer because it is so much a tradition of story and parable.

And imagination.
Precisely. I spent my whole childhood on my knees in front of pieces of carved marble, and in my heart I was filling that stone with enormous life. That gets at the essence of storytelling.

Could you pinpoint any specific influences from your childhood?
I do believe that there’s only a certain period of time when we can be influenced. It’s not so much the books that you read; it’s when you read them. The first adult books that I read as a child were the writers that my parents were reading. Saul Bellow and Philip Roth were the two writers that I started reading when I was 12 or 13. That puts me squarely in the Jewish camp.

What was your family life like?
I was born in Los Angeles, and I grew up with my mother and stepfather in Nashville. My parents were divorced, so when I use the word “parents,” it includes general affection to everyone because my parents both remarried people that I loved very much.

All of my parents were great readers, and as a family we were all readers. We were people who ate dinner together and then we all went to our rooms and got a book. We never watched television.

My father was the Catholic in the family, and he came from a deeply Catholic background. My mother was not Catholic, but when my parents divorced and my mother moved away, it was very important to my father that we continue being Catholic. So my mother put us in a Catholic school so that we could get a Catholic education. That’s all by way of saying that we didn’t go to church on Sunday, but we would go into school early to say the rosary every morning with a nun.

It sounds like much of your faith background came from school.
We moved an awful lot when I was growing up, so my school, which was this old Gothic convent, was the consistent thing in my life. We moved; we shifted around. There was always a good deal of upheaval, but the school was always the same, and it was as much my home and my family as the house where I lived with my parents.

Did you have a good experience with the nuns?
They were Sisters of Mercy, and I did have a good experience with them. It’s something that I have thought about a lot recently.

In the past several years I have reconnected with one of the sisters who was my English teacher from first to third grade. We’ve become very close friends. That friendship has given me the opportunity to think back about these women. They were very close friends with one another. They devoted their lives to intellectual and spiritual pursuits.