Excerpts from "These Precious Days"

Three years ago I expressed my delight in reading Ann Patchett's The Dutch House.  This year I finally got around to reading her 2009 collection of essays "These Precious Days."  Herewith some excerpts, anecdotes, and memorable passages...

"I wondered how my teachers had given me so much encouragement, and decided they'd pushed me along not because I wass talented but because I had no backup plan.  I needed to be a writer because I didn't know how to be anything else..." (230)

"I'd been afraid I'd somehow been given a life I hadn't deserved, but that's ridiculous.  We don't deserve anything - not the suffering and not the golden light.  It just comes." (240)

"Jack Leggett, the director of the [Iowa Writers' Workshop], said on our first day when all the workshop students were together, "Take a good look around.  You will become lifelong friends with some of the people in this room.  You will have sex with some of them.  You may well marry someone in this room, and then you will probably divorce them."  Jack had been at Iowa a long time and he knew what he was talking about.  All of those predictions came true." (257)

They said their daughter, to whom they had read since birth, was not a comfortable reader. They had bought her The Secret Garden, they had bought her Anne of Green Gables, they had gotten nowhere. “What can we do?” they asked... and to my own astonishment, I knew the answer because I had seen it played out time and again. I told them to bring her into the store, give her a copy of Captain Underpants, and let her sit on one of the filthy dog beds with a shop dog in her lap and read the book to the dog. They brought their daughter to the store the next night and she read to a very old dog who worked in our store. I cannot tell you how much this thrilled me... I’m sorry I made my students back in Iowa read Madame Bovary. Don’t get me wrong, I love Madame Bovary, but these were not literature majors. These were kids who may have had one shot in college to feel thrilled and engaged by reading and I’m fairly sure I blew it for them. " (269)

"Sooki got her pilot's license before she learned to drive," Karl told me. "Whenever I came to an intersection I would look to the right, the left, then up and down." (333)

"Death was there on those long sunny days.  Death was the river that ran underground always.  It was just that we had piled up so much junk to keep from hearing it." (367)

"We will never know all the things other people worry about." (386)

Several of those excerpts come from the title essay, which describes Patchett's friendship with Sooki Raphael during the COVID epidemic and Sooki's battle with pancreatic cancer.  If you only have time to read one or two essays, that would be the best, along with "How to Practice," an essay about decluttering and downsizing.

Readers familiar with Ann Patchett's writings are welcome to leave thoughts and recommendations in the Comments.