Ann Patchett explores family, friendship, marriage, failure, success, and how all these forces have shaped her as a writer. Ranging from the personal, her portrait in triptych of the three men she called her fathers, to unexpectedly falling into a friendship with Tom Hanks, to how to answer when someone asks why you don't have children, to the sublime exploring the Harvard Museum of Natural History before its doors open, or the perfection to be found on a single page of Eudora Welty.