These Precious Days

Ann Patchett

Bloomsbury

Otago Daily Times, December 4th 2021

I have always been ambivalent about Ann Patchett’s novels, so reading her new essay collection, These Precious Days, felt like a revelation.Freed from the distraction of overwrought plot, her prose sparkles with wit, clarity, and an intimacy that transforms the reader from stranger to friend. Whether it is watching her clear the house of items bought on mistaken assumptions about the kind of adult she would become (a dozen etched crystal champagne flutes waiting in anticipation for the party “at which their existence would be justified”)  or collapse in fan-girl rapture about sitting next to John Updike at an Arts and Letters luncheon, the slowly accumulating details welcome us directly into her capacious Nashville home. Whilst there are aspects of her life that remain off limits, and this easy intimacy is as carefully crafted as her sentences (which have a fluency that can only be achieved through exhaustive editing), these essays spring from a generosity of spirit that comes from a life of thinking about how other people live.

As Patchett is quick to point out, “The actions of our days don’t add up to plot”, but because she is used to thinking about things in terms of story, the collection as a whole has a pleasing coherence. There are portraits of writers she admires and advice on how to ensure a novel has a cover that reflects its contents (spoiler alert: provide your own). An essay on spring cleaning is echoed in a piece extolling the benefits of not shopping, while a third describes how old letters, drafts, and other ephemera (meticulously preserved by other family members) restore aspects of herself she was not aware were missing. Some provide insight into her other writing – I will revisit State of Wonder with fresh eyes in light of the way people respond to her lack of interest in having children – while others concern friends and family who are obviously under no illusion that they will escape her authorial eye. As her father remarks to her two stepfathers when she corrals them into an uncomfortable family photograph, “You know what she’s doing, don’t you? She’s going to wait until the three of us are dead and then she’s going to write about us.” 

In her introduction Patchett describes the way that thoughts of death haunt her novel writing but that “death has no interest in essays”, and whilst the spectre of mortality touches almost every piece in the collection, even something as apparently whimsical as an the redemptive power of knitting, it is always in the context of the preciousness of here and now, of when and how to let go. Nowhere is this more evident in the titular essay that forms the book’s centrepiece. What begins with an interview with Tom Hanks about his short story collection Uncommon Type (an opportunity that leads her friend Niki to remark “Do you even realise your life isn’t normal?…You understand that other people don’t live this way?”) transforms into a story about his assistant, Sooki, who spent much of last year’s lockdown with the writer and her husband whilst undergoing treatment for pancreatic cancer. Over the course of days and weeks, the two women go from near-strangers to people who can see each other “as our best and most complete selves”,  an experience so important that Patchett felt the need not just to celebrate it in words but to “build a solid shelter for it”. In so doing, she has created a work that is as strong, if not stronger, than the best of her fictional lives.