These Precious Days, by Ann Patchett

Essays

You will not want Ann Patchett’s book of exquisite essays, These Precious Days (now in paperback) to end. The final page feels like hugging your best friend after graduation: Must we part?

The beloved bestselling author of Bel Canto, Tom Lake, The Dutch House, and other novels has collected her second book of autobiographical essays. If you love a book lover, give them this for any occasion or none at all. 

“That moment when you write a single, perfect sentence is worth more than an entire box of biscuits.”

Patchett’s recollections of the Iowa Writers Workshop alone are worth the price of the paperback. As is the title essay, the story of her deep friendship with Sooki Raphael, an artist who worked for Tom Hanks. The story of how they met, how their friendship developed, and how the arrival of cancer changed everything, is tender and moving, and leaves the reader both sad and grateful.  

If all you ever read of people of faith is news about the culture wars, it may be surprising, even refreshing, to read Patchett’s portraits of people of faith. For example, she writes of her friend, Father Charlie Strobel, 

“We want to get close so we can convince ourselves that he is made of some rare and superior material that hasn’t been given to us, but it isn’t true. Calling him a saint is just a way of letting ourselves off the hook.”

I could read her essay, How to Practice, five times, and take delight from it every time. Her warm recollections of her friend’s father, Kent, and his hippie new age wisdom. The groundedness of her husband, Karl, and his willingness to join Ann in a purge of accumulated belongings. 

The content and settings are commonplace: stories of friends, their families, passages of life, work done together. But the way she tells these stories helps us recognize the commonplace as gardens of grace. She never gets sentimental or syrupy. It’s just that she helps us recognize how deeply valuable these relationships and shared activities are.

We learn that Ann spent a year not buying anything. That she owns a bookstore. That she and her mother were frequently mistaken for sisters. That she thought actors should stick to acting. That she was not a strong reader as a child. That knitting saved her life – twice! And that she loved Snoopy…

“Influence is a combination of circumstance and luck: what we are shown and what we stumble upon in those brief years when our hearts and minds are fully open. I imagine that for Henry James, the extended European tour of his youth led him to write about American expatriates. I, instead, was in northern California being imprinted by a comic strip.”

You will relate to some essays and stories more than others. Because you are more interested in knitting, say, than you are in the American Academy of Arts & Letters (of which she is one of the 250 members), Snoopy, or downsizing. But every essay, whether about her mother, her three fathers, fangirling over Eudora Welty, John Updike, or other authors – contains satisfaction and delight. 

And you will absolutely fall in love with Karl, especially when you read about his and Ann’s trip home from Moscow in a plane loaded with American parents bringing home newly adopted Russian babies. 

This book should be read in public, as a public service. You will chortle, there by yourself in the coffeeshop, in the restaurant. People today need to be surprised by overheard chortles. You must not deny them. You may also sniffle a bit.

It sounds trite to talk about perfect sentences. But it would feel negligent not to. (And besides, Ann brought it up.) You will find one, for example, at the end of her short essay, Two More Things I Want to Say about my Father. It is perfect. You may actually sigh, and put down the book for a moment. Smoke a cigarette, because there is something that satisfying about such completions. (I jest; don’t smoke, kids.) There are many such moments throughout the book. You can’t miss them. I was tempted to make this review nothing but a selection of her perfect sentences. But it would be cruel to take them out of context and spoil the effect. These jewels are enhanced by their settings. Boxes and boxes of biscuits. (I am not Ann Patchett; I can mix my metaphors.) Dig in!