“You can’t be a real writer if you don’t have children,” a famous author once told Ann Patchett when they were both speaking at a book festival.
“Emily Dickinson,” she protested.
The full-hearted essays collected in These Precious Days are rebuttals, in various forms, of that cruel and limiting idea.
In one essay, “Flight Plan,” Patchett describes her fears about her husband’s flying hobby: “n the end, it probably won’t be the nose tip or the door.
In “These Precious Days,” the essay after which the collection is named, Patchett recalls doing an event with Hanks, but being starstruck instead by his assistant, Sooki.
“So many other people would have done anything to be with her— her mother and husband, her daughter and son and grandchildren, her sisters and all of her friends…These precious days I’ll spend with you, I sang in my head.
But at their best, they are a catalogue of all the unexpected ways love can look, if you’re imaginative and brave enough to try it — even while knowing that love and grief are two sides of the same coin.