These Precious Days: Essays

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When I asked her how she was feeling, she might admit to being a little tired or having a bit of a stomachache, nothing more than that. Overall , this is an extremely readable collection about family, friends, love and what really matters. Surely we would take off the Wednesday mornings when she had to be at the hospital at seven o’clock. Maybe Niki was right about my life being different, but maybe that’s because I tend to think of things in terms of story: I pick up a book and read it late into the night, and because I like the book, I wind up on a flight to D. Treatments were on Wednesdays—three Wednesdays on, one Wednesday off—with immunotherapy (the trial) every other week.

The plan was that she would go home to Los Angeles during her weeks off, and once UCLA started the trial, she could go home permanently.

She’s kind, hospitable and a loyal and true friend - in fact, at the end of reading this I want her to befriend me!

From the enchantments of Kate DiCamillo’s children’s books to youthful memories of Paris; the cherished life gifts given by her three fathers to the unexpected influence of Charles Schultz’s Snoopy; the expansive vision of Eudora Welty to the importance of knitting, Patchett connects life and art as she illuminates what matters most. The titular essay, “These Precious Days,” refers to her unexpected friendship with a woman named Sooki Raphael (Tom Hanks’s assistant) who stayed with her and her husband for cancer treatments in 2020 while the world was shut down. I did kundalini yoga in the morning, a practice that was built around a great deal of rapid breathing, and then I went on to other things. After dinner that night, Sooki and I sat on the couch and tried to watch a movie, but her phone on its leash began to ding and ding and ding, insisting on her attention. But for all the times people have wanted to tell me their story because they think it would make a wonderful novel, it pretty much never works out.Sooki is flying to Memorial Sloan Kettering in NY (she lives in LA), looking for a clinical trial or something. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer View image in fullscreen ‘Having someone who believed in my failure more than my success kept me alert’ … Ann Patchett.

What if there was some strange alchemy in the proportions that could never be exactly measured and, as a result, she lived, only to die at some later point from the thing no one saw coming: a pandemic, tornadoes, a straight-line wind. The world asks us to engage, and for the most part we can, but given the choice we’d rather stay home.

But well after she had been published, he still believed writing was her hobby and not her job: “Having someone who believed in my failure more than my success kept me alert. it will take some scheduling, and thus, she finally begins a conversation and relationship with Sooki. This wasn’t about an inability to get good medical care; it was about not being able to find a clinical trial that both matched her cancer and could accept her immediately. The last few months, the oncologists were watching the numbers and Western medicine offered nothing to do but to wait and see where the cancer showed up. She was going to be stuck in a chair all day, which was why it was necessary to do it again at night when she got home.