These Precious Days: Essays

by Ann Patchett

I started writing more essays. I went back and looked at other pieces I’d written in the past few years. Most of them I ignored, but those that were strongest I took apart and wrote again. It’s a wonderful thing to be able to go back to something that’s a couple of years old, see the flaws in the fullness of time, and then have the chance to make corrections and polish it up—or in some cases, throw the whole thing out and write a better version.

Death always thinks of us eventually. The trick is to find the joy in the interim, and make good use of the days we have.

But I was a writer and nothing else, and to miss seeing me as such was to miss me altogether.

Every time he sent me down the alley to retrieve the scattered balls I thought, I’ll show you. I will not hit or play or join or score but I will write and I will show you.

Without ever meaning to, my father taught me at a very early age to give up on the idea of approval. I wish I could bottle that freedom now and give it to every young writer I meet, with an extra bottle for the women. I would give them the ability both to love and not to care.

He taught me that to ask someone to read my work was to ask them to give me their time, and so I resolved to never ask anyone to read anything I’d written until I had done every last thing I could to make it better.

It can be hard to remember what someone once meant to you in the wake of so much suffering.

There had never been so many people in that house before, and the chaos and conversations turned into a kind of light, and I, who was always looking to slip away, wanted to stay with them.

I did not glance at the instructions, I followed them, so that even now when someone claims they don’t know how to cook, I find myself snapping, “Do you know how to read?” Paying close attention to the text, and realizing that books can save you, those were the lessons I learned my freshman year of college when school was closed.

Books were not just my education and my entertainment, they were my partners. They told me what I was capable of. They let me stare a long way down the path of various possibilities so that I could make decisions.

Still, the frantic shopping for others needed to come to a halt. The idea that our affection and esteem must manifest itself in yet another sweater is reductive. Elissa said she gave people time, a certificate to watch their kids or clean their house. “That,” she told me, “turned out to be the hardest thing. Time is so valuable.”

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lots of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

“All you have to do,” he tells me, “is give a little bit of understanding to the possibility that life might not have been fair.” The trouble with good fortune is that we tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and less well for others, it’s assumed they must have done something to have brought that misfortune on themselves while we must have worked harder to avoid it. We speak of ourselves as being blessed, but what can that mean except that others are not blessed, and that God has picked out a few of us to love more? It is our responsibility to care for one another, to create fairness in the face of unfairness and find equality where none may have existed in the past. Despite his own experiences with unfairness, this is what Charlie has accomplished. When

After riding around with Charlie, I find it shocking to realize how simple it would be to see myself as a worthless servant, to find joy in the service of others, to open my heart and let it remain open to everyone, everyone, all the time. The trick is in the decision to wake up every morning and meet the world again with love. I have to think the pyrotechnics of sainthood—crucifixion and Catherine wheels, the fire and stake—would be easier than this tireless, unconditional love.

I made the decision to wait until we’d finished with the entire house before trying to find a place for the things we were getting rid of. This is a lesson I picked up from my work: writing must be separate from editing, and if you try to do both things at the same time, nothing will get done. I would not stop the work at hand to imagine who might want the square green serving dish I’d bought fifteen years before and never put on the table.

strangest of all, my consistent anthropomorphizing of inanimate objects—how would those plastic plates with pictures of chickadees on them feel when they realized they were on their way to the basement? It was as if I’d run my fingers across some unexpected lump in my psyche. Jesus, what was that? My

but where did this quick stab of sympathy for tableware come from? I shook it off, refilled the laundry basket, and headed downstairs, wondering if this was a human condition or some disorder specific to novelists. My ability to animate the people who exist solely in my imagination is a time-honed skill, not unlike a ventriloquist’s ability to throw her voice into a sock puppet, a ventriloquist who eventually becomes so good at her job that she can make her hand speak convincingly without the sock, until finally there’s just the empty sock singing “O mio babbino caro” from the bottom of the hamper.

(See, there, I’m doing it again: the glasses were waiting. I had disappointed the glasses by failing to throw a party at which their existence would have been justified.)

Yes, I accept that this is who I am. I was thinking about what the typewriter deserved for its years of loyal service.

Influence is a combination of circumstance and luck: what we are shown and what we stumble upon in those brief years when our hearts and minds are fully open.

Because he had an inner life, I ascribed an inner life to all the dogs I knew, and they proved me right. I have lived with many dogs I considered to be my equals, and a couple I knew to be my betters. The times I’ve lived without a dog, the world has not been right, as if the days were out of balance.

Knitting and smoking were two things that must never coexist. Because my hands were needed to smoke, I used knitting to occupy my hands. When I craved a cigarette, I reached for my needles instead.

Knitting, we may remember, did nothing for my writing. Smoking did nothing for my health. In the end, I had to quit them both.

It wasn’t the answer she was looking for. She pressed on, as if my childless life were a matter for investigative reporting. “But doesn’t that make you sad? The thought of being old and alone?” “I don’t mind talking about this,” I said. “I don’t have children. It’s not a secret. But I wonder, would you ask Jonathan Franzen the same questions? He doesn’t have children.” When the interview aired, all the questions about my childlessness had been edited out.

How I came not to care about other people’s opinions is something of a mystery even to me. I was born with a compass. It was the luck of my draw. This compass has been incalculably beneficial for writing—for everything, really—and for that reason I take very good care of it. How do you take care of your internal compass? You don’t listen to anyone who tells you to do something as consequential as having a child. Think about that one for a second. 15.

I didn’t care if they had more children. Of course I didn’t care. I was standing in a driveway making the idlest conversation, just as plenty of the people who had asked me when I would get married and when I would have children were making idle conversation. It was nothing but noise, a question for the sake of speaking and not for the sake of inquiry. Some of them cared, but not all of them. I should have realized that earlier.

The light pouring in and the light going out. I never would have known how close those two things were if it wasn’t for Marti and Barry and Katherine.

That is, after all, Robin’s superpower: to love the person in front of her as she is, to see all the glorious light inside them and reflect it back, everywhere.

I hadn’t meant this as a dating strategy, but it functioned as one just the same, so I pass this along as advice: if you meet someone you like and you have the means to do so, ask that person to go with you to Vienna.

We believed the hallmark of literary greatness was going to war, racking up a long string of wives, and then blowing your head off in Idaho.

That’s what owning a bookstore has been like for me: it’s reminded me of what I loved about graduate school. It’s made me realize that I could use the tools I’d been given in ways I never knew they could work. I’ve made a soft place for an ever-expanding group of friends and strangers to come and exclaim and argue over books.

That was when I realized that book covers were like birthday presents: How could someone give me what I wanted if I didn’t know what I wanted? That turned out to be the epiphany that changed everything, and by “everything” I mean more than just my relationship to cover art.

He comes over once a month or so for breakfast and I make him poached eggs and we talk about art. The cover plays a part in the book, the artist plays a part in my life. Both of those things have turned out to be a joy. Book, art, friend: I learned the lesson and carried the lesson forward.

The rabbit learns humility and compassion in the course of his trials, but at such a high cost that I wished for him no more hard lessons. I wished for the imperious rabbit what I would wish for anyone: a little love, a little bit of safety and consistency. It turned out to be an enormous ask.

each one came and folded me in her arms, in his arms. There never had been a moment like this in my life, so much love, and all of it free from doubt or exhaustion or misunderstanding. This love had always been there, it would always be there, no matter how I rewrote it or forgot it. I stood inside my gratitude and cried until finally I fell sleep.

HOW OTHER PEOPLE live is pretty much all I think about. Curiosity is the rock upon which fiction is built.

One of the last things I understand when I’m putting a novel together is the structure of time. When does the story start and when does it end? Will time be linear or can it stutter and skip and circle back? At what point does our understanding of the action shift? * * * WE HAVE COME to the point in this story when time changes.

These precious days I’ll spend with you, I sang in my head.

was as if 98 percent of her hair had fallen out, but somehow in the process of falling, it had felted. The chemical tide that rose in Sooki’s blood not only caused her hair to fall out, it caused that hair to mat into a solid surface. Small, flat islands of boiled-wool hair were resolutely attached to her scalp by the 2 percent of hair which had not fallen out. It was a science experiment that could never be replicated. “See?”

BEFORE I CAN start writing a novel, I have to know how it ends. I have to know where I’m going, otherwise I spend my days walking in circles. Not everyone is like this. I’ve heard writers say that they write to discover how the story ends, and if they knew the ending in advance there wouldn’t be any point in writing. For them the mystery is solved by the act, and I understand that; it’s just not the way I work. I knew I would write about Sooki eventually, I had told her so, but I had no idea what I’d say. I didn’t know how the story would end.

The price of living with a writer was that eventually she would write about you. I was taking in every precious day.

As it turned out, Sooki and I needed the same thing: to find someone who could see us as our best and most complete selves. Astonishing to come across such a friendship at this point in life. At any point in life.

When I was young, I read the books that were available, not the books that were appropriate. I read what my mother and stepfather left lying around, which meant I read Updike.