Read This Book…

Ann Patchett is a literary writer who has made her career in writing novels, memoir, and essays for various outlets. While most readers know her as a novelist who wrote Bel Canto and The Dutch House, she has also spent most of her career writing nonfiction on a wide range of subjects, and this book collects some of her best essays from the last eight or so years (catch This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage for earlier essays, which I also highly recommend). In this book, she talks about everything from the influence her three fathers had on her, how knitting saved her life, her husband’s adventures in aviation, the evolution of her book covers, reading Kate DiCamillo, how she met Tom Hanks, and how her blurbing Tom Hanks’ book led to a deep friendship with his assistant, artist Sooki Raphael.

I loved existing between the pages of these essays because Ann Patchett strikes me as a very insightful writer and human, and she’s also lived a very interesting life full of lots of interesting friendships and experiences. She’s warm-hearted, generous, sometimes self-deprecating, often humorous, and she knows how to cut to the heart of matters. While her previous essay collection was a fascinating journey through the early years of her career, this collection of essays is preoccupied with aging and reflection, and there’s a lot of room for that considering that a nice chunk of these essays were written during the pandemic. The title essay, “These Precious Days,” is an achingly beautiful account of her early days of the pandemic and her friendship with artist Sooki Raphael, who was fighting cancer and living with Ann at the time. It’s a story I won’t soon forget, and brought me to tears. Reading this book makes me feel as if I’ve met and chatted with Ann, and that she is someone I’d be happy to know. I think it’s rare that we get such a candid glimpse into the life of a successful working writer, and we’re all lucky to be able to read this book and feel connected to her and her work in this way.