I'm in a blender, that’s where I am.” That’s how bestselling author Ann Patchett describes the book tour she has embarked on for the release of her highly anticipated novel Whistler. Like many of Patchett’s novels, Whistler, at its core, is about family and rekindling relationships, telling the story of an adult woman who reconnects with the man her mother was briefly married to, whose relationship burned bright and fast. Patchett will be speaking about the new novel at the Nantucket Book Festival this June.

"You can’t get away [from family] so you have to deal with your problems,” said Patchett, the author of critically acclaimed novels such as Bel Canto, Commonwealth and The Dutch House. Her settings are often places that are hard to escape, either physically or emotionally. “It’s the same reason why I write so much about family,” she said. “If you hate your job, you can quit. People always talk about leaving their family, but they never really do, even if they haven’t spoken to their parents in years. They’re like a hook in your mouth.”

Patchett has spent time in places that feel inescapable, as well. Sometimes they serve as inspiration. In the early ’90s, she spent winters in Provincetown, where she won a fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center and wrote her debut novel, The Patron Saint of Liars. “Provincetown was, in so many ways, just one of the happiest times in my life,” said Patchett, who now lives in Nashville, where she owns Parnassus Books. “I used to go back and teach at the work center some summers for a week, but I found it really disturbing to see all those people in the deadest town in the whole wide world, and then you couldn’t park on Commercial Street in the summer.”

“It’s like whiplash, like two different places,” she added. “I like those environments, like Nantucket in the winter, where you can’t get away from your problems, so you have to deal with them. That’s just very fertile ground for fiction.” That idea has come through in a number of Patchett’s books, launching her into literary superstardom. She was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and won the PEN/Faulkner Award for her breakout novel, Bel Canto. She has won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation, and was recognized by Time magazine in 2012 as one of its 100 most influential people in the world. But that fame never really sunk in.

Writing, she said, remains business as usual. When asked about how she plans a new book, she said she doesn’t think of big themes. Instead, she simply takes inspiration from the day at hand. “I don’t ever think I’m going to write about those themes [of family or inescapable environments],” she said. “In fact, it’s just the opposite. I will think that I’m not going to write about those things anymore, and then I finish a book and think, ‘Oh, well, look, there those themes are,’ because it’s me and it’s my subconscious, and that’s what I go back to, even if I think I’m not doing it.”

As the owner of a bookstore, business for Patchett also means sifting through hundreds—if not thousands—of books a year that she will put upon the shelves. She chooses some of those books for her book club, which has swelled to 2,000 members. “The UPS truck comes to the house every day and comes to the bookstore several times a day,” she said. “Everybody wants me to read their [pre-publication novel].” But at the end of the day, she can only read so many of them. If a book doesn’t have her attention after a few pages, she’ll give up on it. And with so many author talks, book signings, book clubs and boxes and boxes of advanced reader copies, she finds herself looking for an escape.

In a 2014 essay for The New York Times, she reflected on escapism from her time in Provincetown: “There were so many hours in every day and so few ways to spend them that after trying to figure out how to write a novel all day, I’d drive to Race Point Beach to look at the stars.” Those quiet moments of solitude—like winter in a resort town—serve as the inspiration she needs. “I write more now that I don’t have anytime and my life is flooded with books,” she said. “I don’t understand that, but I think that it’s true of a lot of writers [who are] bookstore owners. You’re just so submerged in that world of literature.”

Ann Patchett will be in conversation with TimEhrenberg on June 13 at the Methodist Church for the Nantucket Book Festival. Her new book, Whistler, comes out June 2.