Like the people in her fiction, the people in Ann Patchett’s life seem to be kind, funny, smart, beautiful. This is part of the reason her essays are such a pleasure to hear, especially if they are read by her. And I concluded she can see what is kind, funny, smart and beautiful in most people.
This collection includes essays about her three fathers, going to Europe with her friend Marty in the early 1980s, her husband’s love of airplanes and flying, and the many instances that people, including strangers, were inclined to give her advice about her preference not to have children.
Her grandmother had taught her the rudiments of knitting, but it was when she was in Europe with her friend Marty that she really learned how to knit. While they were in Ireland, Marty focused on more intellectual matters and she worked on learning to read patterns and to do more complicated stitches. She said, “When I dropped a stitch, I simply walked up to any female person who was older than I was and handed her my knitting. I did not limit myself to women in yarn shops. If there was a woman in Ireland or the British Isles in the summer of 1983 who didn’t know her way around a dropped stitch, I never met her.”
She writes about the her connection to Tom Hanks which grew to include him reading The Dutch House for the audiobook. She came to know his assistant Sooki Raphael and they began an email friendship. Sooki became afflicted with pancreatic cancer and when Ann realized there was an experimental treatment appropriate for her in Nashville, she convinced Sooki to live with her. Of course neither of them could know that in March of 2020, the world would shut down with a pandemic and as a result Sooki lived with Ann Patchett and her husband for longer than expected. The story of how the three coped with that difficult time with kindness and grace was heartening.
In the essay about giving up shopping for a year, she writes about the influence of Catholicism in her life that I enjoyed. “I was raised Catholic and in the same way a child grows up going to the symphony is more likely to enjoy classical music and a child raised in a bilingual household is probably going to speak two languages, many people raised Catholic develop a talent for self denial. Even now my sister and I plan for Lent the way other people plan family vacations. What will we let go of, what good can we add?”
She tells so many charming and poignant stories.
Ann Patchett, These Precious Days, Harper, 2021, 322 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available in the public library.