These Precious Days: Essays

These Precious Days (2021) is a collection of essays penned by Ann Patchett. The collection contains pieces written by Patchett during the coronavirus pandemic, as well as older, previously-published pieces that were reworked for this book. The title essay recounts her relationship with artist and friend Sooki Raphael. Through this essay and multiple others in the book, Patchett explores the theme of what is most precious in life; other themes explored include relationships and community and the importance of writing to her sense of identity.

Patchett is a critically-acclaimed American author who has penned multiple novels, such as Bel Canto (2001) and The Dutch House (2019), and works of non-fiction. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including England’s Orange Prize, the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is also the founder and co-owner of a bookstore, Parnassus, in Nashville, Tennessee.

This guide is based on the HarperCollins Kindle Edition.

Summary

These Precious Days is a collection of 24 essays, including the Introduction and Epilogue, through which Ann Patchett explores ideas about life, relationships, and writing.

In the Introduction, titled “Essays Don’t Die,” Ann describes how this collection came about. During the coronavirus pandemic, Ann finds herself churning out essays because it is the only medium in which she writes where thoughts of death don’t haunt her. In “Three Fathers,” Ann describes her biological father, Frank, and her two stepfathers, Mike and Darrel, and explores her relationship with each of them and the impact they have had on her writing and her life. In “The First Thanksgiving,” Ann narrates the anecdote of the Thanksgiving she spent alone during her first year at college and how she views it as the occasion that marked her initiation into adulthood.

In “The Paris Tattoo,” Ann and her friend Marti travel Europe together in the summer when they are 19. They briefly consider getting tattoos after seeing waitresses in Paris sporting them. Tattoos take on a completely different meaning when they see tattoo-covered young men in Londonderry, Ireland, carrying weapons and manning checkpoints in the city, which has become a war zone.

In “My Year of No Shopping,” Ann shares reflections about material possessions she chances upon after spending a year (and more) refraining from shopping. In “The Worthless Servant,” Ann describes the life of a priest she knows from her hometown, Charlie Strobel, whom she deems a living saint. She uses his example to indicate how love and service are meaningful and attainable ideals for everyone. In “How to Practice,” Ann begins to declutter and sort through her possessions after a friend’s father dies and leaves this overwhelming task to his daughters. In the process, Ann is tested when she is faced with the decision of giving away one of her three beloved typewriters.

In “To the Doghouse,” Ann recounts how the dog Snoopy from the Peanuts comics by Charles Schultz was one of her earliest literary influences. In “Eudora Welty, an Introduction,” Ann extols the greatness of Welty’s writing, explaining its impact on her.

In “Flight Plan,” Ann details her husband Karl’s relationship with planes and flying, the realizations about life Ann gleaned from his stories, and her experiences of flying with him. In “How Knitting Saved My Life. Twice.,” Ann describes how knitting has been impactful and therapeutic for her on multiple occasions. In “Tavia,” Ann describes her closest childhood friend, Tavia, with whom Ann has had a deep friendship that spans more than half a century.

In “There Are No Children Here,” Ann explores multiple contexts and situations in which the question of having children and her choice to remain childless have come up over her lifetime. In “A Paper Ticket Is Good for One Year,” Ann recounts the incident of a trip to Vienna that was serendipitously delayed by a year and the insight she gleaned from the experience. In “The Moment Nothing Changed,” Ann recalls an incident when Karl, her husband, had a health scare and the clarity it brought regarding what is important in life. In “The Nightstand,” Ann confronts multiple pieces of her past, presented in the form of her writing stuffed into the drawers of different nightstands across the years that eventually find their way back to her.

In “A Talk to the Association of Graduate School Deans in the Humanities,” Ann describes her college and graduate school experiences, the lessons she learned while getting her MFA, and how these lessons have been applied to her work and life. In “Cover Stories,” Ann explores her relationship with cover art by discussing how the book jackets of each of her books came to be. In “Reading Kate DiCamillo,” Ann narrates the magical experience of reading her fellow writer Kate’s books for the first time and their unexpectedly deep impact on her.

In “Sisters,” Ann describes her mother, who has been mistaken for Ann’s sister all their lives. In “These Precious Days,” the book's title essay, Ann detailedly recounts the story of her friendship with the artist Sooki Raphael and Sooki’s battle with pancreatic cancer, which Ann witnessed up close. In “Two More Things I Want to Say About My Father,” Ann talks about her father’s impact on her writing and how she felt watching him die slowly over four years due to a neurological disorder.

In “What the American Academy of Arts and Letters Taught Me About Death,” Ann’s induction into the Academy, 12 years after her first visit there, leads to a reflection on life and death. Finally, In “A Day at the Beach,” which comprises the Epilogue, Ann recounts two of the last times Sooki was able to spend some time at the beach with her friends.