He's gone, and after a while, you stop looking."Patchett says she is always drawn to family as a subject."I had a great, big, sprawling, messy family when I was growing up and in ways it was awful and in ways it was fantastic — lots and lots of different people coming in and out."Like Daphne (whose mother remarried after divorcing Eddie), Patchett had three father figures in her life, a story she tells in an essay published first in The New Yorker and then in her 2021 collection, These Precious Days.She says she wanted to tell a different story about stepfamily in her latest novel."I've had several people who've read this book say, 'I got really worried when the stepfather shows up … that something creepy was going to happen' "It also made me very open-hearted with people," she says."My mother married three times, my father married twice, and I primarily grew up with cousins of my stepfather's who didn't have any children, so that's a lot of parents."And if one parent didn't come through … you always had somebody else you could go to and talk to."I had a vast pool of parents to work from, and because of that, I wasn't really ever disappointed in any of them."While Patchett's childhood experience of family was one of abundance and joy, it wasn't perfect.In Whistler, Daphne and her sister Leda share a close bond from a young age