These Precious Days
By Ann Patchett
- Genre
- Art, Culture & Creative Life
- Publisher
- Harper (HarperCollins)
- Publication year
- 2021
- ISBN
- 9780063092785
These Precious Days is an essay collection by the novelist Ann Patchett, published by Harper in November 2021. Its pieces range across family, friendship, writing and mortality, anchored by the title essay about a pandemic friendship. It was a New York Times bestseller and a Barack Obama...
Ann Patchett is best known as a novelist, but her essays may be where she is most disarmingly herself. These Precious Days gathers pieces on marriage, her three fathers, Snoopy, the decision not to have children, and - in the luminous title essay - an unlikely friendship formed during the pandemic with a woman facing terminal illness. Patchett writes plainly and precisely, trusting that ordinary life, closely observed, contains everything. There is no showing off here, only a steady wisdom about time, love and what we choose to keep. intendle recommends the collection to anyone who thinks they don't read essays; these change minds. A New York Times bestseller and one of Barack Obama's favorite books of 2021, it is the kind of volume readers press on friends. Warm without sentimentality, it reminds you that the smallest subjects, handled with care, become the largest.