These Precious Days: Essays

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She can’t help but talk up her acquaintances on the page – a “bombshell best friend” here, a “force of nature, force of life” there. Sooki’s story is written with deep love and compassion, I love it, it moves me and the author also makes me love Sooki. But if you love eloquence and wisdom, and listening to a voice of an author that quickly becomes a dear friend, then I give the audiobook my highest recommendation.

While they all enriched her life in so many ways, I loved the relationship with her father that she only saw one week a year as she was growing up as she and her sister, Heather, flew to California, all of them crying unconsolably as they had to part. It was a minor footnote considering everything I got from Karl, but still, the warmth of it, the love: to walk in the door after a long two days and see that someone had imagined that I might be hungry knocked me sideways. the care and compassion and love she imbues in every story about family, friendships, relationships is so wonderful. It is a beautiful story that I will leave the magic of that relationship to unfold as one reads the book. The stand out story in my opinion is These Precious Days when after reading Tom Hank’s short stories, she gets to meets Tom and his assistant Sooki Raphael with whom she forms an incredible friendship.The producer of the audiobook sent me an article about Sooki from a 1978 issue of New York magazine. Ann Patchett talks about one of my favorite books of hers and certainly one of my favorite book covers, The Dutch House. The months she’d lost not being in chemo while they struggled to locate the new tumor had put her perilously behind.

Sooki had gone to work for the New York City Department of Health’s Bureau of Animal Affairs right out of college.We didn’t know each other, and for the most part our correspondence had come after this defining fact. She had said almost nothing and yet my eye kept going to her, the way one’s eye goes to the flash of iridescence on a hummingbird’s throat. C., if we hadn’t stayed in just enough contact for her to tell me a year after the fact that she had cancer, and if I hadn’t mentioned it to Karl, she wouldn’t have found her way to the only clinical trial in the country that both matched her cancer and could take her immediately. Reading about her love of comics and books brought back memories of my own childhood, where I was perfectly happy in my own cocoon of fictional friends.