These Precious Days: Essays

On Ann’s 57th birthday, she gets a phone call from a man named Damien. In his mother’s nightstand, Damien has found a letter from the Veterans of Foreign Wars from 1980, announcing an award to Ann Elizabeth Patchett. Damien is thrilled to discover that he is speaking with the author Ann Patchett and that it is her birthday. Despite Ann’s assertion that she doesn’t want the letter, Damien insists on returning it to her.

Growing up, Ann remembers stuffing various letters into the drawers of her nightstand. After she moved out to college, her grandmother moved into Ann’s old room and appropriated the nightstands, which moved along with her into an assisted living facility 17 years later. After her grandmother’s death, no one wanted the nightstands anymore, and they moved around for the next many years until Damien’s mother acquired them at an estate sale.

More than Damien’s phone call itself, Ann is struck by the strangeness of how often people have been sending her papers from the past, recently. Many months earlier, Ann’s mother had sent across a box of Ann’s short stories and letters she had found while cleaning out a closet. Ann’s sister sent a similar, smaller stash a few weeks later. Ann kept these boxes alongside the one she had received from her father five years ago. The boxes remained unopened, owing to Ann’s aversion to reading her old writing.

Damien drives down to hand-deliver Ann’s old poems and the letter from the VFW. After re-reading them, Ann feels comfortable enough to go through the boxes passed on by her family. On reading the letters and short stories in her mother’s box, Ann remembers dumping them into the nightstand drawers in her mother’s guest room over many years. Ann’s father’s box contains less of her writing and more clippings and reviews about Ann’s work: “My mother kept the drafts […], my father saved […] a great deal of what had been written about me. Together (separately) those two collections added up to something quite complete” (178).

Ann now keeps pens, scratch pads, and a book light in her nightstand. She finds it helpful to jot down thoughts that awaken her in the middle of the night: fragments of dreams, a grocery list, and ideas for a new story. She thinks about how, if she were to be separated from this nightstand and someone were to find the scraps years later, she would not ask them to throw it all away. She would tell them how she put bits of herself into her nightstand; she would approach the past with much more “tenderness” and “gratitude” this time.

In a talk given to the Association of Graduate School Deans in the Humanities, Ann describes her graduate school experience and its impact on her life’s work. Ann attends Sarah Lawrence in the early 80s, where she learns to read, write, and be a decent human being. After working for a while, she eventually applies and is accepted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1985. She and her dear friend and roommate, the poet Lucy Grealy, are given literature fellowships: top-tier financial aid in exchange for teaching literature to undergraduate students three times a week.

Ann’s training program at the end of the summer consists of selecting a reading list for her students, filling out order forms, and learning the room number of her classroom and her supervisor's name; she never meets the latter. Ann is assigned to teach not because she is necessarily trained, skilled, or wants to do it but because the short stories in her application are deemed better than those of other students. In their second year, Lucy and Ann both receive the Teaching-Writing Fellowship as financial aid, which again sees them teaching, this time an undergraduate workshop once a week. Once again, this is assigned based on the quality of their writing.

Just as Sarah Lawrence was an exceptionally good experience for Ann as a student, Iowa was a bad one. She studies two semesters with visiting faculty and two with long-tenured professors, none of whom have any interest in teaching. It is also a time when the “Cult of Insanity” prevails, in that writers with mental illness, addiction, or melancholy are perceived as talented and sensitive. Ann ultimately learns more from her teaching experience than the workshop itself, the former shaping her into a better reader and thinker and helping her express herself more conscientiously. Graduate school as a whole also toughens her up.

Ann attends a Modern Language Association conference in her second year. Her three thus-far published stories land her 21 different interviews for tenure-track jobs. During an on-campus interview at the University of Missouri, Ann is assured she will be offered the job but is warned not to take it, as it would kill her journey as a writer. Ultimately, she does not end up receiving the job; however, she does internalize the advice and stays away from tenured work, spending years writing for magazines, waitressing, and doing other odd jobs. After publishing her first novel at 27, she slowly begins financially supporting herself through her witting until the success of her fourth novel ensures financial stability.

Ann notes how the MFA is a “funny degree” because MFA programs thrive despite people knowing it will not definitively lead to a job. The programs are more about the like-minded company it provides for the people in it. In this respect, owning a bookstore feels similar to Ann. She didn’t think an MFA would lead to this, but she feels she has done more good through Parnassus than by writing: She has established a place for people in the community to feel welcomed and hosts multiple readings, interviews with authors, and literary and arts events, among others. Ann has further learned through Parnassus, and not the MFA, that to keep reading alive, it is important to engage children in the activity and notes how much of this Parnassus continues to do.

In retrospect, Ann wishes she didn’t make her students back in Iowa read Madame Bovary; she missed her chance to install the thrill of reading in them. She has come to see that the value of a liberal arts education is less about exposure to such texts than about developing the ability to be flexible and curious, promote the works of other writers, and continually evolve. While not all MFA students will own a bookstore, she hopes they will understand that doing so is one of their choices, and multiple possibilities will open up if one remains open-minded and hardworking. Ann reflects on how, although she didn’t need her MFA to write a novel or open a bookstore, it helped her understand the importance of community, even for quieter, introverted readers and writers. In this way, she used her degree to create such a space, which becomes her life’s work.

Ann is 27 when her first novel is published. She does not know much about book jackets, and the cover for The Patron Saint of Liars is painted by the same person who did the cover of Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons. The same year, several successful books by other authors are published, with covers featuring photography and graphic design. Ann’s second novel features a book jacket in this style, which Ann hates, but the publisher threatens to withhold distributing her book if she refuses the cover.

Ann loves the cover chosen for her third book, The Magician’s Assistant, but switches publishers for her fourth because everyone she knows leaves the agency by then. She is sent several mock-ups for her fourth novel, Bel Canto, and has her friends help her pick one. The book ends up with good covers for both the hardback and paperback, though it features different covers for the foreign editions, published in 30 different countries. She does not have much control over these.

For her fifth book, Ann gets sent many mock-ups again. The publisher rejects her initial choice; by the time they settle on an acceptable cover, a large amount of time and goodwill has been expended in the process. Ann finally realizes that, as with birthday presents, she must first know what kind of cover she wants if her publishers are to give her what she likes. This changes her relationship with the cover art of her books. When she finishes her next book, she sends the publishers a photocopy of an album cover she loves as a reference point; she ends up with a beautiful book jacket.

After opening Parnassus, her bookstore, Ann begins noticing other things about books, like the paper, typefaces, and so on. Her next two book jackets turn out well; she is equally sure of what she wants when she writes The Dutch House and, for the first time, collaborates on the cover, commissioning a painting from an artist she knows. It turns out perfectly. For These Precious Days, Ann again uses two paintings by her close friend, Sooki Raphael: One is a woodpecker bracketed by books, and the other is of her dog, Sparky. Ann cannot decide between the two beautiful pieces, and her publisher eventually grants her both covers for the book. A vastly different experience from her first book jacket, Ann wonders whether her visual discernment has improved over time or if she is finally taking full responsibility for what bears her name.

Ann meets the writer Kate DiCamillo at an event in Nashville. By strange coincidence, the very next day, Ann receives an email from another writer asking if Ann knows Kate. The writer has just finished reading Kate’s book, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, with her son and wants Ann to pass on the message that it “cracked them open and made them better people” (217).

Having never read any of Kate’s books until then, Ann decides to do so before talking to Kate. She begins with Edward Tulane, a story about a china rabbit first owned by a doting child but which ends up in one difficult situation after another. After Edward Tulane, which Ann loves, she reads through all of Kate’s books, discovering they are exceptionally well-written stories about “tragic childhoods” and “magical animals.” The way Kate effectively writes about suffering and cruelty experienced by the characters in children’s stories leads Ann to realize that children suffer, too.

One of the last books she reads is The Magician’s Elephant, which ends up being a favorite. It features a dog who is small, white, and talented, sharing the same name and characteristics as a dog Ann once owned: Rose. Ann recollects the childhood feeling of an author speaking directly to you in a story.

Kate’s books open up something in Ann that allows her to access things she had believed were lost to her. She calls out to people long passed—her father and stepfather, her friend Lucy, Rose—and feels their love all over again. With deep gratitude, Anna reflects on how Kate’s books allowed her to believe again, “to walk through the door where everything I thought had been lost was in fact waiting for me” (223).

Growing up, Ann is constantly mistaken for her mother’s sister. It is a compliment to Ann because her mother is beautiful, but mostly to her mother. She was 26 when Ann was born and retained the youthfulness of her twenties for most of her life. She was beautiful—she had “drawn a winning ticket from the genetic lottery” (225) in Ann’s estimation—and this was enhanced by how well she dressed and cared for herself. People were always falling over themselves to help Ann’s mother, enamored by her beauty. Despite being beautiful, Ann’s mother is not a narcissist; she is funny and kind and worked as a nurse her whole life, with an exceptional ability to comfort people when they needed it.

As Ann grows up, she does not aspire to be beautiful; she has seen beauty’s benefits and drawbacks in her mother’s experience and prefers to be neat and well-groomed but invisible. The older Ann gets, however, the more it is taken for granted that she and her mother are sisters. When both wear makeup, the 26 years between mother and daughter are evened out by Ann’s mother’s natural beauty. At such times, they even get asked if they are twins. The only other time Ann and her mother come close to evening out in appearance is when Ann’s mother falls sick a little before turning 80. Ann rushes her to emergency care in the middle of the night and stays by her side in intensive care, both looking haggard and pale. A nurse comments on how alike they look, not like sisters, but as if they were the same person.