It’s fine. I knew going in it wouldn’t be a favorite. I just hoped that I had bought enough good will with Ann Patchett’s Whistler the month before and that the book’s slim 130 page count would get my book club over the finish line, because I needed to talk about this book with other people.

There is a science to curating book club picks. You don’t want to go for crowd-pleasing bestsellers with soothing character arcs every time - those can result in boring conversations (having haters in the room is essential to inflaming passions, and you don’t get haters with a book everybody mostly kinda likes). You also can’t get too weird with it, or else soon you won’t have a book club. There is a Goldilocks zone - books neither too soft nor too hard, but just right.

I’ve gotten a decent feel for the dangerous books - the ones with unlikable narrators, experimental formats, stream-of-consciousness and heady philosophical concepts. The kinds of books that get called pretentious. The gnarly ones that make you feel like you’re back in your favorite English class grappling with how they were written and why, where the book’s form is itself part of the story. It’s the kind of book that lights my brain on fire, but it’s also the kind of book that pisses people off (something I’ve learned over years of telling people that my favorite book is The Sound and the Fury). Heaven help if the author *gasp* doesn’t use quotation marks, or readers will take their seats with a meaningfully marked up book in one hand and a pitchfork in the other.

Why my book club almost broke into fisticuffs over Ann Patchett

And Transcription is a weird one. Written in a triptych of perspectives in almost pure dialogue, Transcription captures conversations like a recording device, the book itself a phone left inconspicuously on a coffee table, face down. In the first section, an unnamed narrator (god, do people hate it when a character doesn’t have a name) travels to interview his aging mentor, a renowned academic named Thomas, for a profile. Only the narrator drops his phone - his sole recording device - in the sink, breaking it. Instead of telling Thomas of the mishap and rescheduling the interview, the narrator forges ahead as if his phone is working.

It’s a maddening refusal that comes with spiraling consequences. The unnamed narrator, so preoccupied with his inability to capture the interview, misses what Thomas is telling him - misses, for instance, the significance of the name Dignitas, which Thomas keeps bringing up. Is that some fancy hotel in Switzerland? the narrator thinks as he fiddles with his broken phone.

Transcription lost a lot of readers in my book club right there.

“Why did he just tell Thomas he broke his phone?” readers asked again and again. “What’s the big deal? It just doesn’t make any sense.”

Many readers, mostly women, kept coming back to that sticking point, as if the whole book they hadn’t enjoyed reading could have been avoided if in the fictional realm, this pigheaded, wine-addled, unnamed narrator had just done the obviously right thing and been upfront about the accident.

But since when can people be counted on to just do the obviously right thing?

Transcription is so much about men and their inability to communicate: the unnamed narrator cannot communicate his shortcoming, however inconsequential, to his idol for whom he was a sort of surrogate son; Max, Thomas’ actual son, cannot communicate his hurt about his upbringing to his father until he believes he’s dying of COVID and he has the digital barrier of a nurse holding a phone to his face; Thomas cannot communicate anything, really, without intellectualizing it and going maddeningly abstract, even when the subject is his own granddaughter’s failing health.

This is where the book club conversation really came alive, discussing the book’s third section, written from Max’s point of view and concerning his poor daughter Emmie and her struggles with ARFID - Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder. Her parents can’t get her to eat, neither with punishments nor rewards. No threat or enticement will work. On a good day, she will lick a bit of icing from a cupcake she will then throw in the trash. She’s an anxious kid, concerned about climate change, and particularly wildfires. Max wonders whether Emmie is starving herself “because she is registering a sense of futurelessness, catastrophe — fires, floods, fascism?”

One woman in our group shared that she works in education and she sees this all the time.

We’d been talking about smart devices and what they were doing to us - to our individual brains in our skulls, to society. Certainly it does something to the soul, I said, and by extension the entire social fabric to witness daily atrocities served up to us by the addictive computer in our pocket. Earlier that day, even, I’d been scrolling and paused on an auto-play video of a serene looking village cupped by mountains. Nepal. Little dots moved around the screen - people, going to work, going to school, running errands, when a rushing wall of water bulldozed the village. The little dots disappeared in the deluge. Entire buildings collapsed in an instant and washed away.

I just watched hundreds of people die, I realized. I scrolled to the next video.

The woman who works in education said, “Everything you see on your phone, those videos of floods and people getting shot? The kids see them too. And the really smart ones, the kinds of kids who get anxiety and ARFID? They’re smart enough to understand what they’re seeing.”

Though they’re vastly different in style, tone and effect, Transcription reminded me very much of Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, a slim roundhouse kick of a novel that captures so keenly the serendipitous virality of Old Twitter, the cadence of the constantly refreshing timeline and the brain-damaging dose of Dopamine that comes with having gotten the attention of strangers. It’s the only piece of art I’ve ever encountered that actually captured what it felt like Old Twitter did to my brain.

I imagine that book must be confounding to anyone who wasn’t addicted to Old Twitter. Similarly, I think Transcription must be confounding to anyone who isn’t brutally addicted to smart devices, who’s never lost an hour or two to in an afternoon to short-form videos or found themselves pulling up directions to a place they’ve visited a dozen times

What struck me in this meeting was how many times a person would start their comment with the words, “I didn’t like this book,” then over the course of talking about it, would end on something like, “I found it really interesting.” That’s better, I think, and more rewarding than universal praise, a grappling with the content even when the form frustrates, sticking with something that is not immediately pleasurable.

Lerner writes, as the unnamed narrator with the broken phone, “But I couldn’t attend to the poems. I wanted - I needed - to check my texts, my email, to swipe and scroll and photograph, to frame and filter and archive, to share my location, etc., so as not only, not fully, to be where I was; since at least 2008, to be where I was was too much for me, or too little.”

I also now have trouble attending the poems with a brain so addled by the outrage and dopamine factory I carry around in my pocket. Perhaps when I drop mine in the sink I will let it stay broken. Perhaps I will not see any more little dots become engulfed so that my brain can heal and attend the poems.

It scares me for professional reasons. I was a journalist for 20 years and Books Editor for USA TODAY. I saw the readership metrics on our stories and how few seconds readers gave any given article (it’s worse than you think). I saw the weekly book sales data used to compile the USA TODAY Best-selling Books list and the scant handful of copies of anything substantive that moved each week, even from big sellers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble (also worse than you think).

Now, I work with career academics, and I’m hearing firsthand the horror stories from innumerable professors as their pedagogies are being set on fire by LLMs, and of the increasing numbers of students entering higher education without basic reading and writing skills - without, even, the desire to acquire those basic reading and writing skills.

But mostly it scares the shit out of me because I can feel how sluggish my own brain has gotten, how impatient I now am with anything less than instant gratification. I can measure the change in the reduced number of books I’m reading year after year. In the writing projects I start with zeal and abandon more and more quickly as the distractions mount.

I’m even starting to lose the attention span for films. A couple Christmases ago, one of my good friends wanted to show me her favorite film, Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World, which clocks in at nearly 5 hours long. She insisted we watch it in a single sitting for the most pure experience, and 5 hours of sustained attention felt like a threat. Genuinely, I was panicking, like a smoker about to get on a long-haul flight, calculating the hours until I could get my next fix.

It was a magnificent film, and painfully prescient: it involves a device that can record dreams, and characters who become addicted to the portable video screens that play their dreams back to them to the point of catatonia. To witness this in my fourth hour of sustained attention while holding my iPhone in my hands, palms sweating with the effort not to check social media and break the film’s spell, felt like a personal indictment.

This year, I’ve made a concerted effort to fight further erosion, to claw back lost ground, regain my attention span, and cede less of my thinking life and waking hours to the asshole computer in my pocket. When this iPhone 13 dies, I’m switching to two tin cans and a length of string.

Here are five things I’ve done - habits I’ve cultivated, tools I’ve employed, communities I’ve built - that are making a measurable difference in my ability to concentrate, read, and write.

1. Focus Keeper & Focus Friend

Ironic maybe to use my phone to defeat my phone, but I have found the apps Focus Keeper and Focus Friend a phenomenal help. The latter is particularly silly. Developed by Hank Green, Focus Friend features a little cartoon bean (I’ve named mine Dolly) who will shut down all the apps on your phone for a predetermined amount of time during which it will knit you something. I’ll brick my phone for 30-minute chunks and dedicate myself to reading or writing (or just as frequently, pacing while I try to think of something to write). When the 30 minutes are up, Dolly will have made me socks or a scarf, which I can eventually trade in to decorate a room for Dolly, giving me some of the reward-based dopamine I missed out on not messing with social media for 30 minutes.

It’s bleak that this works. But it does work.

2. Accountability Buddies

You’ve got to get your friends involved, because nothing is more effective than the threat of embarrassment and social censure. Earlier this year, some of my bookish buddies and I organized a book crawl: we started the morning at a cafe, where we read in communal silence over coffee and pastries; we migrated in the afternoon to the public library and sat with our books in the reading room; and we finished the day with cocktails over books and a trip to the bookstore (for more books). When it was all over, we shared our page counts for the day.

Sharing the page count at the end was clutch - I’m a slow reader, but I was damned if I was going to come in last place.

3. Conquer a Classic

The little computer in your pocket has wrecked my brain (and likely yours) by supplying a steady drip of dopamine hits through social media likes and short-form video content. The variable rewards of each swipe on a platform like, say, TikTok, is like pulling the lever on a slot machine - the next video may be a dud or an ad, or it may be 15 seconds of hilarity, cuteness, sometimes brilliance. The promise of getting your next fix keeps you swiping.

The rewards are ephemeral, fleeting, often immediately forgotten with the next swipe. They are entirely different from the rewards you get with slow, patient, sustained attention, which are deep and long-lasting. The hitch is, you have to work a lot harder for them. It’s the difference between investing the time and energy into making fresh pan-seared salmon and roast vegetables for dinner or eating a package of M&Ms and handfuls of shredded cheese over the kitchen sink.

When COVID hit and we were all stuck in our homes, going mad in our heads, I read along with author Yiyun Li, who facilitated a collective reading of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, an experience she later captured in Tolstoy Together: 85 Days of War and Peace with Yiyun Li.

Friends and I have begun replicating this experience together with other books over a longer timeline: last year, a group of us read Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove over a period of several months (a phenomenal book, it’s been months since we finished and I still think about Gus at least once a day). Currently, we are about three-quarters of the way through Middlemarch, which I am also greatly enjoying. I would have picked neither of these books up without the added incentive of accountability the same way I never would have watched Until the End of the World unless it meant not disappointing a friend.

Community brings out the best in us, always, even when the goal is to disappear into a story.

4. Little Treats

This bitch loves a little treat. It can be tiny, entirely insignificant, but the dopamine hit of a silly little real-life treat is a thousand times more potent than an Instagram like or funny TikTok video. This year, my best friend has been giving me cute stickers to put in my journal whenever I complete a self-improvement task, such as turning my phone off for half an hour to read a book with sustained attention. It’s such a small thing, but it’s so effective. I get sad when I open my journal and notice there hasn’t been a sticker for a few days, and often that promise of a shiny little treat is all it takes to get me to put my phone away and pick up a book.

5. Book Clubs

In a way, this is just an extension of everything I’ve already written about accountability - participating in a book club is another way to build a foundation of accountability into your life, giving you a due date for completion and other human beings to answer to if you fail to follow through on your end of the commitment.

For me, it’s a bit more serious: for the past 11 years, I’ve curated and hosted the First Draft Book Club at Changing Hands Bookstore. I’m the one who has to pick the books, create the discussion guide, and keep the conversation moving. The desire not to embarrass myself in front of a room full of people is extremely motivating and keeps me reading.

But even if you’re just a participant along for the ride, book clubs get you thinking critically. You want to show up with something to say. A flip switches in your brain when a book is an assignment, and you start thinking about character arcs and theme, metaphor and sentence structure.

There’s one older woman in my book club who shows up every month with a whole package of notes - she’s read the New York Times Book Review and interviews with the author, and she’s got a typed page with her own thoughts outlined. She’s 80 years old, and she’s doing homework for fun.

She is who I hope to be at 80. All the more motivation to kick this awful addiction.

Happy reading!

(SPOILERS ahead: This book club discussion guide covers the whole book, including the ending, so proceed with caution or bookmark until you’ve finished the book.)

1. Whistler is a gentle book, even on the Ann Patchett sliding scale of gentleness. Is there a place in serious literature for kind, happy characters and kind, happy stories? Or do you need more conflict to become invested and take the story and its characters seriously?

2. Do you agree with Eddie that in general good people outnumber bad people, and that by and large people are nice and helpful?

3. The relationship between Daphne and Eddie is such a keen portrayal of platonic love, which is under-represented in lit-fic. Why do they share such a strong bond? And do you consider Whistler a love story?

4. Daphne and Eddie are estranged for decades before their chance encounter in the art museum. Why do you suppose neither tried to contact the other in all that time?

5. Eddie’s decision to marry Abigail and Abigail’s decision to divorce Eddie were informed by societal pressures at the time. Do you sympathize with the choices they made?

6. Abigail married three times, giving her daughters three distinct phases in their young lives. Do you think Abigail did the right thing by her daughters? How did your perception of her as a mother and a woman shift throughout the story?

7. Abigail says at one point, “If you don’t have children with someone, the marriage doesn’t count.” Do you think that’s true?

8. What is your impression of the relationship between Eddie and Skip? Do you think Skip treats Eddie poorly, or is his behavior just the result of being in an impossible situation for the times?

9. What the heck is going on with Skip and Polly? Does Polly know, or does she refuse to know?

10. The novel reveals its secrets and family history slowly. Did you find the story’s pacing effective in building tension or did the book feel slow to you?

11. Why does Eddie tell Daphne the story of Whistler in the car? What effect does that story have on her when she is tasked with getting help?

12. Why do you think Patchett chose “Whistler” as the title for her novel? How does the story of Mary and Whistler impact Daphne?

13. Why do you think Daphne never told anyone about her adventure finding help the night of the car accident?

14. At the end of Whistler, Eddie tells Daphne to write their story, “Because in the book, I don’t die.” Are we reading the story Daphne has written in real time?

15. And if you really want to blow up your book club discussion… When Eddie implores Daphne to write their story so he can live, is he talking about surviving cancer? Or is it possible that Eddie didn’t survive the car accident that night? Thing about the story of the horse Whistler and Eddie and Daphne’s conversation about the concept of the Bardo.

For 11 years, I’ve been running the First Draft Book Club at Changing Hands Bookstore. How quaint, right? You’re likely imagining a dozen ladies sitting in a circle, some with knitting in their laps. Maybe half have finished the book and the other half showed up anyway for the company and an excuse to get out of the house.

But I want you to look at the photo above. My friend Jason tried to count the people in the room that night, the last Wednesday of July, and lost track at 120. That’s 120 real, live human beings who got in their cars and drove to uptown Phoenix on a Wednesday night, fought for parking spaces in a cramped lot, stood in a line that snaked to the door for a glass of wine, and sat for close to 90 minutes touching shoulders with the people next to them to throw down over Ann Patchett.

It was the most bonkers book club meeting I’ve ever moderated, and I’ve moderated a fair few: 133 since the book club launched in 2015, skipping one month when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and we were trying to figure out how to go virtual, if my math is right (never trust my math). My earliest misstep was assigning everyone to read Otessa Mosfegh’s Eileen in December of 2015, as bleak and unChristmas-y a winter book as ever has been written. That was a spicy meeting and a lesson in reading the room as much as the book.

Anyway, back to Whistler. The first 30 minutes or so of the discussion were business as usual. Patchett is in a reflective mood, and Whistler, like Tom Lake, is about a woman revisiting her youth in life’s golden hour. Daphne, a charming, mild-mannered creative writing teacher in her 50s, happily married many years to an older man left widowed by his first wife, has a chance encounter at the art museum with Eddie, her erstwhile stepfather. She’d only known Eddie for a few years of her youth - Eddie, her mother’s second of three husbands, who left her life as suddenly as he’d entered it, had been a soul mate of sorts; whatever souls are made of, theirs were the same. And then they got into a car accident, a bad one, at night while on a side quest to look at the stars. The two were left stranded in a tree, a few of Eddie’s important bones crushed in the dark and freezing cold, decades before the advent of cell phones.

They made it out of the car alive, though Eddie’s marriage to Daphne’s mother did not - she filed for divorce and remarried shortly after. Everyone seemed to move on. Now, late in Eddie’s life and midway through Daphne’s, there’s an unexpected chance at reconnection.

We were having a perfectly lovely conversation about this perfectly lovely book - a conversation about love, memory, found family, and platonic soul mates. But then a man named Alex raised his hand.

(Spoilers ahead if you haven’t finished Whistler, though I don’t think this is a book one can spoil, despite the nature of the argument that follows.)

Towards the end of the book, it is revealed that Eddie has cancer. Daphne dutifully attends chemotherapy with him, and Eddie makes Daphne promise to write their story as a book, to immortalize the two of them and their love for each other, and to end the story just here - talking over chemotherapy - so that he never has to die.

What if, Alex said, Eddie wasn’t dying of cancer at the end of the book. What if Eddie was already dead? What if he died in the car that night, his leg crushed, his body temperature plunging? What if little Daphne never made it in time for help? What if Eddie’s suggestion at the end that Daphne immortalize him in a book - presumably the book we, the readers, are engaged in conversation about right now - isn’t about a version of him surviving cancer, but surviving the car crash?

The room erupted. I mean, erupted. People were screaming (in a good way, but still, screaming). I asked for a show of hands: How many of the 120 people in the room thought Eddie died in the car that night? Apart from Alex, only one woman raised her hand - confidently, because she had brought receipts. There was that weird conversation, she said, Daphne and Eddie had about the concept of the Bardo, about souls trapped in transition.

The room plunged further into chaos.

We stayed almost a half-hour past the book club’s end time to keep unpacking Alex’s crazy theory, which was feeling less crazy with each passing minute. I asked for another show of hands at the end of the conversation - how many people had been converted to Alex’s cult? Twenty-ish hands went into the air.

“Alex, we’ll see you in the parking lot after this is over!” someone (jokingly?) threatened.

In an interview with Elle about Whistler, Patchett spoke about her warmhearted writing of stories about good people trying their best to be good to one another - an approach sometimes criticized as saccharine. “I can watch the news; I can read the paper; I can know that terrible things are happening everywhere,” Patchett says. “But in my life, everybody’s so nice. In the bookstore, in my house, in my neighborhood, in the grocery store, people are kind to one another.”

We can argue about the merits of kind lit-fic and whether it offers enough meat on the bone. But the reason the room erupted that night and a book club meeting almost ended in fisticuffs is because Patchett succeeded in her literary goal. Not in pulling the rug out from under the reader with a plot twist (I still disagree with Alex, though I appreciate the lunacy he injected into the night’s festivities) - but in creating a kind character so real feeling, a room full of readers was plunged into despair at the far-fetched suggestion of his untimely death. The depth of love for Eddie in the room that night was palpable. Eddie! A fictional, mild-mannered book editor who likes a bit of white wine in the early afternoon. For this man, my book club called for muskets at dawn.

Patchett had made us fall in love with one of her inventions. I can’t think of any higher art than that.