I get asked sometimes, who’s your favorite author? And I’m always taken aback because it feels a little like asking a parent, who’s your favorite child? Which, you know, I couldn’t possibly choose.
So it feels significant to say out loud that if there is one author whose books I am guaranteed to gobble up, who I will read every time, it is Ann Patchett, and she has a new one out.
And I want you to explain why that felt easier to write during a pandemic than fiction.
PATCHETT: Yes.
And the only time I ever feel paranoid about death is when I’m in the middle of a novel because I don’t want the novel to die.
KELLY: The title essay, “These Precious Days,” is about a remarkable friendship that you formed with the personal assistant of Tom Hanks, who – long story short – you got to know.
And I keep talking to Sooki, and I just think, this is the most interesting person I’ve met in I don’t know when, which is odd because, of course, I’m also meeting Tom Hanks for the first time…
Hey, how are you? And then I found out that she had had pancreatic cancer, that she had had a Whipple, that she had gone through chemo and radiation, that she had been pronounced cancer free, that her cancer came back.
It turns out that the trial that they were running at the hospital where he worked was exactly the trial she needed.
She was just coming out for, really, a matter of days so she could start it here and then fold into the UCLA trial.
But you write that what you loved was finding someone who sees you as your best and most complete self and that she did that for you, and you think you did that for her.
PATCHETT: It really is.
But I was a freshman at Sarah Lawrence, and my cousins had brought me home for Halloween my first year of college ’cause I was really homesick.
And so when I looked up dressing, you know, it says, start with a loaf of day-old bread and make cubes.
And when I was young, the two things that were unbelievably expensive were long-distance phone calls and plane tickets.
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