These Precious Days: Essays

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By the time the book is written, there is little evidence of the initial spark or a long-ago conversation in California Pizza Kitchen. I knew that she worried about her ninety-four-year-old mother in Rye Brook, New York, and read to her grandchildren in San Diego over Zoom. UCLA had plans to start the same clinical trial that was up and running in Nashville, but not for another month or two, a unit of time that could not be lost to waiting. You know when people compliment an author by saying, "Oh, I would read their grocery list if they published it!

Whether all of this together was what helped, or whether she had made up her mind to see only the good, I couldn’t say.

There’s usually a guy working the light board and the mics who talks to me for a minute, though tonight the guy talking was Tom Hanks. Marriage meant that he would hear out what on the surface may have appeared to be a spectacularly stupid idea. I think that what I love most about her essays is her humility and her love of books from the time she was a small child. Seventy percent of participants rated it among “the most personally meaningful and spiritually significant experiences of their lives.

In life, time runs together in its sameness, but in fiction time is condensed—one action springboards into another, greater action.I knew there was a part of her that believed that maybe what Nashville had to offer in terms of fighting cancer was happening in our house, that she was improving because she was with us. Patchett thought about the boxes in her own basement, all the gifts and possessions she had forgotten about over the years. She has always travelled a lot, doing interviews and book shows, so she later crosses paths with Hanks and his assistant, Sooki, a tiny, fascinating woman she would like to get to know. As with any collection, there were some essays I liked better than others, and I recommend reading (or listening) to one or two a day, not straight through.