These Precious Days by Ann Patchett — personal, yet universal
Written by ABC AUDIO on December 16, 2021
At 58, Ann Patchett is a fine model for literary success. Her eight novels include the 2001 bestseller Bel Canto and critically lauded books from Commonwealth (2016) to The Dutch House (2019). In 2004, Patchett published Truth and Beauty, a stirring memoir about her friendship with a fellow writer, the late Lucy Grealy, and since 2011 she has co-owned a Nashville bookshop, Parnassus Books.
These Precious Days, which comprises 23 essays written and reworked over the past decade, is a superb introduction to some of Patchett’s perennial themes: family, the writing life, friendships, the need to view death and grief as part of life.
The keystone of the book is a 66-page account on the close friendship that sprang up between Patchett and Sooki Raphael, assistant to the actor Tom Hanks, who lived in Patchett’s home for several months while receiving treatment for pancreatic cancer, just as the pandemic began. “The price of living with a writer was that eventually she would write about you,” Patchett writes. “I was taking in every precious day.”
What emerges is an account of a growing closeness between two highly creative minds, but also an exploration of the challenges faced by those already managing a serious illness during the Covid-19 crisis.
Patchett and her husband became Sooki’s second family as lockdowns put an end to travel. She dwells with wonder on what Sooki brought to their home; through chemo treatments, Sooki cooked meals when she could, and shared her rediscovery of herself as an artist. Before her stay, the friends had exchanged work emails, then notes and gifts of books: “The world that Sooki inhabited was electrified by greens and blues, purple bougainvillea draping over hot-pink walls, colours too vivid to be explained. She would pour colour into my [email] inbox for a while and then be gone again.”
Other essays in this collection explore the influence of writers, from Eudora Welty to the children’s book author Kate DiCamillo — and of Charles Schulz’s comic strip beagle, Snoopy, as writing coach: “The first time I’d ever heard of War and Peace was when he performed a six-hour version with hand puppets.”
Patchett can pull off a virtuoso blend of clinical distance and immense warmth, as when she discusses her three fathers: her birth father, her stepfather, and her mother’s third husband. “Contrary to popular belief, love does not need understanding to thrive,” she writes of her birth father, who kept up a steady patter of discouragement, questioning his daughter’s early and stubborn need to write.
Aspiring writers could learn from her response: “Having someone who believed in my failure more than my success kept me alert. It made me fierce. Without ever meaning to, my father taught me at a very early age to give up on the idea of approval.”
Alongside whimsical pieces on how knitting saved her life or Patchett’s friendship with a local priest, is “There Are No Children Here”, a rousing message of solidarity to those who have chosen not to have children. Patchett tells it straight, as ever, to an author who declares, while they’re both onstage at a book festival, that you can’t be a real writer if you don’t have children: “I have to tell you, people without children have known love, and we are writers.”
She speaks eloquently for all those women who find themselves constantly judged or even condemned for their lack of interest in parenting. “People want you to want what they want. If you want the same things they want, then their want is validated.”
Patchett’s gift is to write from intensely personal territory but to make her insights — about the importance of being generous in our relationships, or the fine balance between optimism and grief — seem universally relevant. As you read these meditative but warm-hearted essays, you begin to understand what matters most — not just to Patchett, but to you.
These Precious Days by Ann Patchett, Bloomsbury £16.99, 336 pages
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