Ann Patchett's friendship with Tom Hanks’ assistant anchors luminous new essay collection

Perhaps you, too, received a link to a 20,000-word story in Harper’s last January by the bestselling novelist and Nashville, Tennessee, bookseller Ann Patchett. It was a shaggy dog of a story by a woman passionate about dogs, touching on a variety of subjects, including her friendship with Tom Hanks’ assistant Sooki Raphael; Raphael’s treatment for cancer; the early days of the coronavirus pandemic; the art and craft of writing; and – I kid you not – psychedelic mushrooms.

Many people loved it; some dared to hate it. Given Patchett’s astonishing gifts as a storyteller, others embraced it – but with reservations. Called “These Precious Days” (Harper, 320 pp., ★★★★ out of four, out Tuesday) after a line from the pop standard “September Song,” memorably recorded by another Nashville legend, Willie Nelson, the essay lends its melancholy title to a new collection of essays by one of America’s premier writers.

The overarching theme in many of the essays is the writing life, from the kindly advice she got as an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence from the celebrated author Allan Gurganus to her near-religious experience reading the works of the children’s author Kate DiCamillo.

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She states it quite plainly in the introduction, “Essays Don’t Die,” a short piece that describes the process she used to select the essays for this book, most of which appeared in slightly different form in other publications. “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.”

A second theme that emerges is the central role women have played in her life, from her sister, mother and grandmother to the nuns who presided over her K-12 education; the largely female staff of her Nashville bookstore, Parnassus Books; and classmates in college and grad school, including the late poet Lucy Grealy, whom she befriended at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and later memorialized in “Truth and Beauty.”

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Not to say she gives short shrift to men. In other essays, Patchett extols the enduring influence of John Updike, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth on her own writing; meditates on her friendship with Charlie Strobel, a priest in Nashville whom she calls a “living saint”; and tries to capture the flavor of her odd-couple relationship with her second husband, Karl, immortalized in the title essay of an earlier collection, “This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage.” As a medical doctor on staff at the Nashville hospital where Raphael was treated for advanced pancreatic cancer, he plays a crucial role in “These Precious Days.”

Finally, there’s that essay. Whether you loved it or hated it may depend on your feelings about celebrity culture since the benevolent presence of Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, hovers in the background. It may also depend on how you feel about cancer narratives as well as the life-enhancing or -destroying power of what are now politely referred to as “psychedelic plants,” but which used to be called “drugs.”

Ultimately, though, the story shares its DNA with other essays in the book that focus on Patchett’s life as a writer – specifically, where and how she gets her material. A writer’s life is by definition one of solitude, but Patchett, perhaps more than others, appears determined to wrest incident out of the random details of her busy life as an A-list writer and advocate for independent bookstores. “How other people live is pretty much all I think about,” she says. “Curiosity is the rock upon which fiction is built.”

Here’s how the story came about: Patchett was invited to interview Hanks while he was on a book tour. Backstage, she met his beguiling assistant. Later, she asked him if he’d be willing to record the audiobook of her latest novel, “The Dutch House.” When he agreed, she began a protracted email exchange with Raphael to work out the details. One thing led to another – chief among them, finding out about Raphael’s illness – and soon, the movie star’s longtime assistant had moved into her house.

Patchett’s good intentions to help a stranger she took a liking to can’t be separated from her self-promoting instincts to make a story worth writing about. Which she did. And which, despite several cringe-worthy passages, it is a moving and memorable account of a brief but incandescent friendship.

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