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    These Precious Days: Essays
    These Precious Days: Essays
    These Precious Days: Essays
    Ebook340 pages6 hours

    These Precious Days: Essays

    By Ann Patchett

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The beloved New York Times bestselling author reflects on home, family, friendships and writing in this deeply personal collection of essays.  

    "The elegance of Patchett’s prose is seductive and inviting: with Patchett as a guide, readers will really get to grips with the power of struggles, failures, and triumphs alike." —Publisher's Weekly

    “Any story that starts will also end.” As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart. 

    At the center of These Precious Days is the title essay, a surprising and moving meditation on an unexpected friendship that explores “what it means to be seen, to find someone with whom you can be your best and most complete self.” When Patchett chose an early galley of actor and producer Tom Hanks’ short story collection to read one night before bed, she had no idea that this single choice would be life changing. It would introduce her to a remarkable woman—Tom’s brilliant assistant Sooki—with whom she would form a profound bond that held monumental consequences for them both. 

    A literary alchemist, Patchett plumbs the depths of her experiences to create gold: engaging and moving pieces that are both self-portrait and landscape, each vibrant with emotion and rich in insight. Turning her writer’s eye on her own experiences, she transforms the private into the universal, providing us all a way to look at our own worlds anew, and reminds how fleeting and enigmatic life can be. 

    From the enchantments of Kate DiCamillo’s children’s books (author of The Beatryce Prophecy) to youthful memories of Paris; the cherished life gifts given by her three fathers to the unexpected influence of Charles Schultz’s Snoopy; the expansive vision of Eudora Welty to the importance of knitting, Patchett connects life and art as she illuminates what matters most. Infused with the author’s grace, wit, and warmth, the pieces in These Precious Days resonate deep in the soul, leaving an indelible mark—and demonstrate why Ann Patchett is one of the most celebrated writers of our time.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateNov 23, 2021
    ISBN9780063092808
    Author

    Ann Patchett

    Ann Patchett is the author of novels, most recently the #1 New York Times bestselling Tom Lake, works of nonfiction, and children's books. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner, the Women's Prize for Fiction in the UK, and the Book Sense Book of the Year. Her novel The Dutch House was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and Time magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. President Biden awarded her the National Humanities Medal in recognition of her contributions to American culture. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she is the owner of Parnassus Books.

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    Reviews for These Precious Days

    4.5/5

    333 ratings43 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I'm so not the target market for this book; I was continuously surprised how much I enjoyed it.
    • 5/5
      Ann Patchett's "These Precious Days" is a collection of essays she wrote that appeared "in slightly different form" in such publications as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, and Harper's Magazine. Among the topics that the author discusses are her mother's three marriages; Patchett's passion for writing; her husband, Karl VanDevender; the friendships she cherishes; and Parnassus, the bookstore she co-owns that is a gathering place for avid readers and celebrities.

      When Ann was a little girl, her mother, a great beauty, left her first husband and took her daughters with her. Although these were challenging times, Ann's bond with her grandmother and a nun, Sister Nena—one of her favorite teachers in Catholic school—made her childhood a bit more tolerable. Patchett's prose is crisp, lyrical, unfussy, and dryly humorous. In a straightforward and conversational style enhanced by evocative metaphors, she conveys her thoughts about her profession, personal life, and the people who influenced her. There is a funny and charming chapter in which Ann pays tribute to Snoopy, the indomitable beagle who writes stories about his fantasies and inspired her to dream big dreams.

      Two of Patchett's themes are gratitude and the importance of using our allotted time on earth wisely. In some of the book's most moving chapters, Ann describes her relationship with Tom Hanks's kind, good-natured, and talented assistant, Sooki Raphael. While undergoing treatment for cancer, Sooki moved into Karl and Ann's Nashville home and, for the length of her stay, became a treasured member of their household. This intimate, entertaining, and thought-provoking essay collection shows how Patchett's experiences helped shape her perspective on what matters most in life.
    • 5/5
      What a warm embrace that was, gently and radiantly welcoming me back into reading after a pregnancy reading hiatus.
    • 3/5
      Beautiful, poignant, seamless literature.
    • 5/5
      Loved this book. Picked it up in an airport during a long layover. Started reading it and was so engaged I almost missed my flight. Ann writes with so much insight and authenticity. What a huge contribution she makes to enhancing and unfolding our humanity.
    • 4/5
      This collection of essays is more autobiographical than a bunch of disjoint short stories. These are a reflection of Ms Patchett's experiences and most tie together. I enjoyed her stories on her 3 fathers; not shopping for a year; how her natural father acted as her secret editor but wasn't until his death that she felt free to write on some taboo topics; and her story of Sookie. It was interesting to get some background on her novels, where they came from, etc. I found it interesting how almost all have ties to her real life. I found Ms Patchett at times a bit boastful. Although I can understand her annoyance about being childless, having been childless myself until late in life, however, I thought the writing went a little over the top to justify her decision, I got the point. Negatives aside, I like her books I've read and overall enjoyed this one too.
    • 5/5
      I am a fan of Ann Patchett, I love her fiction books but I think I love her non-fiction even more! Both of her essay books and Truth and Beauty are some of my all time favorites. Highly recommend this book!
    • 4/5
      Collection of twenty-four essays on such diverse topics as Patchett’s three fathers, literature, travel, disease, friendship, art, marriage, death, hobbies, and more. She weaves in observations about daily activities. I particularly enjoyed the piece on her decision to not have children, and the various responses and unsolicited advice she receives. The primary set piece of this collection is the title essay, where she tells of picking up Tom Hanks’s book (the short story collection Uncommon Type), and how that one decision led to a deep friendship with his assistant, Sooki, who ended up staying at her house during the pandemic while she obtained cancer treatments. She wrote these pieces during the pandemic, saying “death has no interest in essays.” They are not just random writings. They are connected through themes of life, death, and love. She writes of death without being morbid. Patchett comes across as observant, sincere, and interested in others. This collection is worth reading.
    • 5/5
      Anne Padgett's novels have been favorites of mine for years, and this book extends my appreciation into her essays. She writes about her own past and about writing, but her most striking essays are about life and death. Sometimes, she is almost shockingly forthright and honest -- in discussing, for example, her own decision to remain childless. Even more resonant for me was her description of her reaction to her father's death. He died of a neurological disease called progressive supranuclear palsy or PSP, after an illness of several years during which one after another of his abilities was leached away. My husband died of the same illness, after almost 10 years of gradual and then accelerating decline. Ms. Padgett had the courage to say what I did not -- that her loved one's death was an occasion of joy. That was because he was finally released from his suffering, and because those who cared for him were freed from a demanding and hopeless task. I felt the same, but could never say so. This alone would make the book very meaningful to me, but there is much more in it that is wise, generous, and beautifully expressed.
    • 5/5
      Listened to the author's reading of the audiobook. So, so, so good. Especially loved the long essay about Sookie.
    • 4/5
      This is a collection of essays, some of which were published elsewhere. Many of the topics in the essay are at least tangentially related to the Covid-19 pandemic. Other's relate to her family, friends, and her education. As always with Patchett, her use of language is stunning. Although many of the essays touch on the subject of mortality, the book is not morbid. In fact it is a reminder that indeed, these days are precious.
    • 5/5
      How could you not love anything written by Ann Patchett. I have read her from the very beginning and recommended her to everyone who would listen. Highlights for me are the title essay and reading about her fathers. I am psychedelics curious and her experience made an impression.
    • 5/5
      A series of great essays by an author who is at the top of her game. She covers a wde variety f topics that include her family, her education and writing career. The must important essay and titled the same as the book itself is about her close friendship with a woman who when she met her was Tom Hanks' personal assistant. (Sooki) This essay deals with Sooki's terminal illness and their joint journey navigating "These Precious Days).A worthy homage.
    • 4/5
      I listened to the audio book (Patchett's voice is amazingly similar to Laura Linney), I enjoyed listening to most of the essays, some more than others (her year of no shopping and thoughts on being childless are my favorites) I don't know if I would have enjoyed as much if I had not listened to the audio book. A writer reading their own words can set the tone for their book and I think she did an excellent job.
    • 4/5
      This lovely collection of essays was like having a conversation with a friend. Ann Patchett has lived such an interesting life, and all the people close to her have also lived interesting lives. The intersections produce stories that are humorous, touching, thought-provoking, and always deeply personal. The way Patchett describes something as simple as knitting or cleaning out the house makes me want to -- well, learn to knit and go clean out my house. LOL I truly enjoyed this gem of a book.
    • 4/5
      I have come to enjoy Ann Patchett's essays more than her fiction. Simply written, these read like individual vignettes from her life, filtered through her lovely mind & spirit. A very nice read!
    • 5/5
      I listened to the audio version (read by the author) while I worked - thoroughly enjoyable!
    • 5/5
      Essay collections by famous authors can be tricky as they often collect a lot of older works and put them all together to sell as new. These Precious Days by Ann Patchett definitely has some previously published older essays, but for me, the wonder of the new writing far outweighs the annoyance of this, and Patchett is almost always worth re-reading anyway. The last group of stories about her friend, Sooki, was worth the price of the book three times over. I listened to the audio, and Patchett reads the book herself which just adds to the pleasure. A huge recommendation to anyone who likes essays, Ann Patchett, or just enjoys great writing on any level.
    • 5/5
      Wonderful essay on a developing friendship.
    • 5/5
      I just finished These Precious Days: Essays and loved it which was a surprise since I didn't like it at first. Sometimes our favorite fiction writers aren't all that interesting in nonfiction, plus she has great respect for the Catholic religion or for practitioners of it. My Year of No Shopping didn't really apply to most of us since, as Patchett says, she's rich. She has so much accumulated stuff that she doesn't need to shop for more. She doesn't even need to get a new dress for an extra special occasion since she has lots of extra special dresses. But that wasn't the one that got me - The Worthless Servant was. In fact, I came very close to abandoning the book after this nonsense about faith and self-sacrifice. But, it's Ann Patchett, so I continued and loved the rest of the book, and was inspired and uplifted by it. The woman knows how to do friendship.
    • 5/5
      I had only read one of Patchett’s books, “The Dutch House” (2019) before reading “These Precious Days.” This, of course, is a book of essays while the previous book is a novel. Patchett’s essays are really well written (as was “The Dutch House”) and span many topics. Probably my favorite and the favorite, no doubt, of most readers, is the last, an essay from which the book gets its title. It is a tribute to her friend Sooki Raphael. In the words of the bard himself, “If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.” The essays are thoroughly enjoyable, even the sad ones. Patchett is a gifted writer, one who deserves to be on the pedestal of American letters where she resides.
    • 5/5
      Sometimes I think Patchett's nonfiction is even better than her fiction. These essays reveal so much about her life and character that it's hard not to feel very emotionally involved with her. I particularly loved the chapters: My Year of No Shopping, Three Fathers, How Knitting Saved My Life. Twice, Cover Stories, and Eudora Welty an Introduction which pushed me to order The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. But the title story, These Precious Days and also A Day at the Beach, nearly tore my heart out. Such a great collection.
    • 5/5
      Essays on everything from knitting, dogs, choosing cover art for her books, friendships and family to it's okay to not have children and so many more. Insightful, witty and poignant.
    • 5/5
      This is a really wonderful collection of essays that gave me a glimpse into the personality and world-view of an author who has become one of my favorites. Patchett lets the reader in to her relationships with her three fathers, and her quest to become less materialistic by not shopping for a year, which also leads to her purging her house. She also spends a lot of time on one of her relationships with a woman with terminal cancer. Through these essays, you really get a picture of Patchett's life and thoughts and what has given her life meaning. It never feels preachy and it isn't overly sentimental.

      I listened to this on audio, read by Patchett herself, and I highly recommend this format. I only listen to audiobooks occasionally, but this might have convinced me to listen more regularly. I also bought paper copies of this book for both my mom and my mother in law for Christmas.

      Highly recommended.
    • 2/5
      I read some, skimmed some and gave up on this. I loved "This is the Story of a Happy Marriage', but couldn't get into these.
    • 5/5
      Lovely; sometimes brutally beautiful in its honesty. The book was very long for an essay collection and took me a month to get through. but I do believe many of these essays are truly great. Patchett is undoubtedly among America's greatest living writers.
    • 5/5
      I had only read one of Patchett’s books, “The Dutch House” (2019) before reading “These Precious Days.” This, of course, is a book of essays while the previous book is a novel. Patchett’s essays are really well written (as was “The Dutch House”) and span many topics. Probably my favorite and the favorite, no doubt, of most readers, is the last, an essay from which the book gets its title. It is a tribute to her friend Sooki Raphael. In the words of the bard himself, “If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.” The essays are thoroughly enjoyable, even the sad ones. Patchett is a gifted writer, one who deserves to be on the pedestal of American letters where she resides.
    • 5/5
      Now and then I will pick up a book of short stories and skim through it, but seldom do I read every story. Ann Patchett’s collection of personal stories is the exception, The short story that represents the title comes near the end. It’s about an effervescent woman with pancreatic cancer who lives with them during the pandemic as she seeks out trials to put the cancer into emission. Patchett’s ability to write about her own experiences and make them meaningful to the reader is superb. Anyone who loves Kate DiCamillo’s children’s books as much as I do and encourages adults to read them is my kind of person
    • 5/5
      A really excellent collection of personal essays by the novelist discussing a wide variety of subjects including fathers, reading, writing, death, not having children, book covers and friends.
      So much love shines through, so I recommend this book, since who doesn’t want to be uplifted.
    • 5/5
      Death "has no interest in essays," Ann Patchett says early in “These Precious Days” (2021), her latest collection of personal essays. She explains that whenever she's writing a novel, she fears dying before she can finish it. No such fear troubles her mind when she's writing essays, they being short enough to finish before death becomes an issue.

      Yet if death has no interest in essays, her essays often show an interest in death, even as focused as they are on the joy of living. The title essay, easily the longest in the book, tells of the close friendship she established with Sooki Raphael, who worked as an assistant for the actor Tom Hanks. She met Hanks while promoting his book “Uncommon Type” and through him met Sooki.

      The two women exchanged emails, but the friendship developed only after Sooki was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Patchett's husband, a physician, suggested Sooki could get the most advanced treatment for her particular cancer in Nashville. Patchett offered her a room in their home near the Nashville hospital. Sooki said she would stay with them for a few days but ended up living with them for months because of two developments: their intense friendship and Covid. These days were precious to both women, in part because they both knew Sooki's disease would likely soon end in death. It did.

      In "Three Fathers" she writes about her father and her two stepfathers, all now deceased, and the influence each of them had on her life. Elsewhere she tells us more about her father, the Los Angeles police detective who arrested Sirhan Sirhan after the Robert F. Kennedy assassination.

      The essay "What the American Academy of Arts and Letters Taught Me about Death" tells of her acceptance into the academy, which has no more than 250 members at one time. In other words, one American writer must die before another can be accepted.

      Other essays show a lighter touch. "My First Thanksgiving" tells about her being stuck at college one year at Thanksgiving and preparing her first Thanksgiving dinner from recipe books, inviting several other stranded students to share it with her.

      "My Year of No Shopping" tells how she abandoned all non-essential shopping for an entire year and how this helped her appreciate what she already had — and allowed her to donate more money for the benefit of others.

      "There Are No Children Here" explains her decision not to have children.

      In "Sisters" she writes not about her sister, as you might expect, but her mother, who has always looked so youthful that people frequently have asked if she and her daughter were sisters. (My ever-youthful wife was often asked if she and her son were siblings, so I know how this can happen.)

      These and the other fine essays in the book confirm the truth of Patchett's title, even if death does lurk in the background, seemingly uninterested.

    Book preview

    These Precious Days - Ann Patchett

    Dedication

    to Maile Meloy

    Contents

    Cover

    Title Page

    Dedication

    Introduction: Essays Don’t Die

    Three Fathers

    The First Thanksgiving

    The Paris Tattoo

    My Year of No Shopping

    The Worthless Servant

    How to Practice

    To the Doghouse

    Eudora Welty, an Introduction

    Flight Plan

    How Knitting Saved My Life. Twice.

    Tavia

    There Are No Children Here

    A Paper Ticket Is Good for One Year

    The Moment Nothing Changed

    The Nightstand

    A Talk to the Association of Graduate School Deans in the Humanities

    Cover Stories

    Reading Kate DiCamillo

    Sisters

    These Precious Days

    Two More Things I Want to Say about My Father

    What the American Academy of Arts and Letters Taught Me about Death

    Epilogue: A Day at the Beach

    Acknowledgments

    About the Author

    Also by Ann Patchett

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    Introduction

    Essays Don’t Die

    The first time I remember seriously thinking about my own death, I was twenty-six years old and working on my first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars. No matter where I went, I carried the entire cast of characters with me—the heroines and heroes and supporting players, as well as the towns they lived in, their houses and cars, all the streets and all the trees and the color of the light. Every day a little bit more of their story was committed to paper, but everything that was still to come existed only in my head. Remembering things is how I work. I didn’t have outlines or notes, and because of that, I was hounded by the thought of stepping off a curb at the wrong moment, or drowning in the ocean (this second scenario seemed more likely, as I was living in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where I swam in the freezing water and was prone to cramps).

    Were I to die, I’d be taking the entire world of my novel with me—no significant loss to literature, sure, but the thought of losing all the souls inside me was unbearable. Those people were my responsibility. I’d made them up, and I wanted them to have their chance. The specter of my death stayed with me until the novel was finished, and when it was finished, death lit out for a holiday.

    No luck lasts. A few chapters into my second novel, there death was, picking up the conversation exactly where we’d left off. I was living in Montana by then, a state full of potential deaths I’d never thought to worry about: falling off a hiking trail and down the side of a mountain, being hit by a runaway logging truck, being eaten by a mountain lion or a bear. Every trip outside was a meditation on mortality. But when I wrote the last page of that novel, death packed up without a word. Through editing, copyediting, page proofs, book tour, it never crossed my mind that I might break through the solid ice that had formed over the river and be swept away.

    When death came back for the third time it was, as always, without fanfare. I was deep into my third novel then, and had been at the job long enough to recognize the pattern.

    My professional life has continued to be marked by this on-again, off-again relationship, and, weird as it is, the problem isn’t unique to me. Before she boards a plane, one friend sends me instructions as to where in her house she’s hidden a thumb drive with the files for her uncompleted novel; another friend asks me if I could just finish her book for her if she dies. I left a Post-it on my computer, she tells me, saying you’ll write the end.

    According to my small, unscientific study, writers who were already deep into a project when the pandemic hit were okay going forward, while those of us who had yet to start, or had barely started, froze in our tracks. Death had gotten the jump on me this time; I was worrying about it before I’d even come up with a fully formed idea for a novel. What was the point of starting if I wasn’t going to be around to finish? This didn’t necessarily mean I believed I was going to die of the coronavirus, any more than I believed I was going to drown in the Atlantic or be eaten by a bear, but all those scenarios were possible. The year 2020 didn’t seem like a great time to start a family, or a business, or a novel.

    Of course I was still writing essays. I’m always writing essays—eight hundred words on owning a bookstore for a newspaper in London, my ten favorite books of the year for a magazine in Australia, an introduction for a newly reissued classic, maybe a little piece about dogs. Essays never filled my days, but they reminded me that I was still a writer when I wasn’t writing a novel.

    That was how I found my loophole: death has no interest in essays.

    Why hadn’t I noticed this before? When I wrote my first essay collection, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, death didn’t even bother to rattle the windows. The book felt so ridiculously personal that I worried only about whose feelings I might hurt, and gave no consideration as to whether I might step on a snake. I realized that for all the essays I’d written in my life, I’d never once heard the ethereal shush of a scythe being sharpened nearby. Had death wandered off because no immense cast of imagined characters could be obliterated? Or was it because the things I wrote about in essays were true, verifiable? Were I to abruptly exit in the middle of writing an essay, there would be someone around who, with a certain amount of research, could bring it to conclusion. They might not write it the way I would have, but the same facts would be available to them. Or maybe the facts themselves were the problem. Imagination can be killed but facts are infinitely harder to snuff out. I know it might not seem this way. Time works tirelessly to erase facts—this country works tirelessly—but facts have a way of popping up, their buoyant truth shining all the more brightly with time. Maybe that was why death wasn’t interested in essays; essays don’t die. I decided to go all in.

    I began to write longer essays, and I wrote them for myself: Why the sudden desire to get rid of things? What did it mean at this point in my life not to have children? Other essays came out of conversations I had with friends, most notably the piece about my three fathers. After my friend Kate’s father died, she told me she was going to write about him. I’d been thinking of writing about my own three fathers for fifteen years but had never found the courage to follow through. I asked her if I could tag along. Writing is such solitary work, but in this case her companionship made me brave.

    It wasn’t until I wrote the title essay, These Precious Days, that I realized I would have to put a book together. That essay was so important to me that I wanted to build a solid shelter for it. I started writing more essays. I went back and looked at other pieces I’d written in the past few years. Most of them I ignored, but those that were strongest I took apart and wrote again. 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. That’s something I never get to do with novels. Through these essays, I could watch myself grappling with the same themes in my writing and in my life: what I needed, whom I loved, what I could let go, and how much energy the letting go would take. Again and again, I was asking what mattered most in this precarious and precious life.

    As for death, I have remained lucky. Its indifference has never waned, though surely it will circle back for me later. Death always thinks of us eventually. The trick is to find the joy in the interim, and make good use of the days we have.

    Darrell Ray, Ann Patchett, Frank Patchett, and Mike Glasscock. September 2005

    Three Fathers

    Marriage has always proven irresistible to my family. We try and fail and try again, somehow maintaining our belief in an institution that has made fools of us all. I’ve married twice; so has my sister. Our mother married three times. None of us set out for this. We meant to stick our landing on the first try, but we stumbled. My parents divorced when I was five. My mother and my stepfather Mike had their final parting when I was twenty-four. She married Darrell when I was twenty-seven, and they stayed together until he died in 2018, when I was fifty-four.

    My problems were never ones of scarcity. I suffered from abundance, too much and too many. There are worse problems to have.

    The second time my sister, Heather, married, she wanted a real wedding. Heather and her new husband, Bill, threw a terrific party in a fancied-up barn that had been turned into an event space. They’d hired a swing band with a handsome front man—Heather and I both had a terrible crush on him, and now neither of us can remember his name. Karl and I had eloped a few months before, and those beautiful words of love and commitment were still fresh. We drank the champagne, danced in a line, blew soap bubbles into the night sky above the bride and groom. Only my stepfather Mike was sullen. His third marriage was nearing its end, and he was in love with my mother again. But my mother was happy with Darrell, and so Mike danced with me for most of the night.

    My father, who had always hated my stepfather, hated him less now that he too had lost my mother. At my sister’s wedding, my father contented himself with simply hating my mother, even though she had left him for my stepfather in 1969. Beneath the glow of the little white lights draped over the ceiling’s crossbeams, my stepfather’s love for my mother and my father’s hatred of her looked remarkably similar.

    Darrell noticed none of this. He had fallen down the brick stairs that led to the back door of their house eight weeks before and fractured several vertebrae. He was wearing a brace beneath his suit, beneath his clerical gown. He was a retired Presbyterian minister and he officiated my sister’s wedding, despite the pain it caused him to walk and stand and breathe. He hung on through the dinner and then got a ride home.

    But the story I want to tell begins just after the wedding was over and before the reception began, while the photographs were being taken. Or it happened months before that, when I first realized all three of the fathers were going to be at Heather’s wedding—the family equivalent of a total solar eclipse. I wanted a picture of that.

    I called my father first, as I pegged him to be the one most likely to say no, but he surprised me. Sure, he said, fine. He didn’t care. Then I asked Mike, who would have found a way to get me the North Star had I wanted it. He hesitated but then said yes as well. He didn’t like the idea, but as far as I was concerned he didn’t have to like it. It would take two minutes. Darrell had never met my father before, and had met my stepfather only once in passing. Unlike my father and stepfather, Darrell owed me nothing, but he said he’d do it.

    The wedding took place in late September on a day that was clear and bright and still a little warm. After Heather and Bill had been photographed with every possible configuration of family and friends, I lined my mother’s husbands up together. In one picture it’s just the three of them in their dark suits, and in the other I am with them in my garnet bridesmaid’s dress. Darrell holds up one of my hands, Mike holds the other, and my father in the middle has his hand on my waist. They look like they’re trying to steady me. My father is the handsome one, the one whose face registers genuine happiness for the day. Darrell is smiling bravely, very straight in his back brace. And Mike looks like he’s going to leap out of the frame the second I let go of his hand.

    We were all standing there waiting on the photographer, my father told me later on the phone. And Mike said, ‘You know what she’s doing, don’t you? She’s going to wait until the three of us are dead and then she’s going to write about us. This is the picture that will run with the piece.’ My father said the idea hadn’t occurred to him, and it wouldn’t have occurred to Darrell, but as soon as Mike said it, they knew he was right.

    He was right. That was exactly what I meant to do. That is exactly what I’m doing now.

    THE THREE FATHERS died in the order in which my mother had married them, and they died in the inverse order of their health. My father went first, even though he had made a religion of the elliptical trainer, the treadmill, the NordicTrack. He spent four slow years dying of a neurological disease called progressive supranuclear palsy, which in the end confined him to a wheelchair. My stepmother took care of him at home, a Herculean task that allowed him to die in the comfort of their bed.

    Mike didn’t have a fourth wife. He spent his last two years living with his older daughter, Tina, who gave him all the love and attention he had denied her as a child. Mike made death look easy. He had some dementia, and six weeks after he was diagnosed with kidney failure he went gently in his sleep.

    Darrell made death hard. He hadn’t been well for decades. After his broken back there was a series of splintering falls, a terrible car accident, a shunt for hydrocephalus, and two kinds of cancer. But he kept on living. When I was sitting by Darrell’s bed in the assisted-living center where he spent his last, excruciating years, I thought again about the photograph. He was the last, and the one who had played the smallest role in my life. I held his skeletal hand and thought about what I would write after he died.

    But when death finally came I found I didn’t want to think about Darrell anymore. I didn’t want to think about any of them. I had—along with my sister and my stepsisters, my mother and stepmother—spent so many years seeing them through and then seeing them out. I went back to the assisted-living center to empty Darrell’s room the night he died, to drag the unopened cases of Depends and Ensure to the community room for anyone who wanted them, and then I carted off his paperbacks and impossibly large shoes to Goodwill. When I was done, I was done with all of it. That remained the case for a long time.

    IN 1974 MY father signed up for the 100 Greatest Books of All Time from the Franklin Library. He went for the full leather option—silk-moiré endpapers, sewn-in satin-ribbon bookmarks, every edge of every page gilded in twenty-two-karat gold. When the people at the Franklin Library came up with this monthly subscription service, my father was the sort of customer they had in mind. He didn’t intend just to buy the books, he intended to read them. He intended to be the kind of person who sat in his home library of leather-bound books with embossed spines reading The Return of the Native. Month after month, year after year, he spent a significant amount of money to be that person.

    My father had grown up the third of seven children. He was born in 1931, the first of the Patchetts to have been born in this country. His parents left England to find work in California, and after a long stretch of nothing—it was the Depression—his father landed a job as a machinist at Columbia Pictures. But when the set builders went on strike he went with them in solidarity, and all of them were blackballed from working in the studio system again. My grandfather became a janitor at the Los Angeles Times, a filthy job because of the ink that got on everyone’s hands. Later he was able to get my grandmother a job in the cafeteria there. The family of nine shared a three-bedroom house on Council Street near Echo Park in Los Angeles. My father slept in a narrow bed on the back porch.

    When my father got out of the navy, he moved back to Council Street and worked in a liquor store for a couple of years while he applied to the Los Angeles Police Department. He kept being rejected because a doctor said something was wrong with his heart, until finally another doctor said nothing was wrong with his heart. He became a police officer. He married my mother, a beautiful nurse. They had two daughters and bought a house on Rossmoyne Avenue in Glendale. Then my mother fell in love with Mike, who was a doctor at the hospital where she worked, and when Mike moved to Tennessee she packed us up and followed him there.

    Without us, my father rented out the house on Rossmoyne and returned to Council Street. He lived with his father and his sister Cece, who worked for the phone company. When Heather and I flew from Nashville to visit for a week every summer, we slept in Cece’s bed and Cece slept on the couch, somehow convincing us that the couch was where she’d wanted to sleep all along. Our father was back in his bed on the porch. After the yearly purchase of two plane tickets, he used what was left of his savings to take us to Disneyland or Knott’s Berry Farm, but the place we all liked best was Forest Lawn. Forest Lawn was free. We would bring a lunch and walk the paths through the exemplary grass to see where the movie stars were buried, then we would go and stand in the crisp, cold air of the flower shop, which looked like a summer retreat for hobbits. The place smelled overwhelmingly of carnations, a scent I still associate with those happy afternoons spent in the cemetery.

    Our father moved back to the Rossmoyne house when he married our stepmother. She made the place a loving home where we were always welcome. The Franklin Library extended its offering beyond a hundred, and my father bought those latecomers as well. After that he subscribed to the presidential series.

    Every book arrived with a slim pamphlet that included an overview of the text and some study questions to consider. It soon became clear that my father was not going to get through the Oresteia one month and The Decameron the next, but he faithfully read the pamphlets and kept them stored in the small box that had been sent for this purpose. He believed he would catch up eventually, if not on vacation then once he retired. He wanted to read the books and he wanted the books to be read. He was all too happy when I sat down with The Red Badge of Courage or Pride and Prejudice when we came to visit in the summer. He let me take his copy of Anna Karenina to the condo he and my stepmother had bought in Port Hueneme up the coast from Los Angeles. I sat in the living room reading day after day and wouldn’t go to the beach.

    This father, you might think, is the perfect father for a writer. To which I would say, yes and no.

    For all his love of books, my father believed that childhood development rested on the ability to play volleyball. Even on the beaches of Southern California, I doubted this was true, but in the Catholic girls’ school my sister and I attended in Nashville, I was sure he was wrong. From the other side of the country, my father wanted to shape us. He had better luck with my sister. Heather was three and a half years older. She’d had three and a half more years to spend with him. When he gave her instruction on what classes to take and what clubs to sign up for and how many sit-ups to do every night, she listened. I didn’t listen. When I was nine he sent Heather a volleyball net and a ball and $10, which was her payment for forcing me to play. She was to be his emissary and my coach, but we fought like wolves in those days. She strung the net up from the carport to the fence and then took it down, because you can lead your sister to the volleyball net but you cannot make her spike.

    My father wanted me to be athletic. He wanted me to be on teams, join clubs, start clubs. He wanted me to run for office in any organization that held elections. He wanted me to audition, volunteer, be a part of something, submit. When I claimed to have no interest in a high school sorority he was pushing, he told me to become a member of that organization, rise through the ranks, and then change the system from within. He wanted me to infiltrate.

    What mattered, he told me, was being well-rounded, but there was nothing well-rounded about me. I found another book and slunk into a corner. I told him I was going to be a writer. My father didn’t mind my reading—he was a reader—but he told me he didn’t see how I was going to be a writer.

    I’m sure it’s a common state to feel unseen by one’s father, but the fact that I saw my father only one week a year made my condition literal. My father and I didn’t see each other, and so we didn’t understand. It was clear that he didn’t know me, but it took a long time for me to realize that I didn’t know him either.

    Someday you’ll get divorced, he told me when I was in high school. You’ll have a couple of kids to support. You’re not going to be able to do that writing. I couldn’t be so selfish, he was saying. I had to think about what was best for those kids. It doesn’t take a bucket of insight to figure out where this was coming from. My mother hadn’t listened to him either. She thought my becoming a writer was an admirable plan.

    My father wanted me to be a dental hygienist, though whenever he came back from vacation, he would tell me how much fun I’d have working on a cruise ship. I might have killed him had we lived in the same house, he might have killed me, but long-distance phone calls were expensive in those days and we talked only once a month. My sister took his instructions to heart—he wanted her to go to law school. She was the smart one, my sister, an excellent student. But when he gave me advice, I held the phone away from my ear. You are a duck, I would tell myself. This is rain.

    I’m older now than my father was then, and I think about these conversations differently in the aftermath of time. Maybe he was trying to save me from suffering. He remembered his father walking through Los Angeles all day looking for work with a sandwich in his pocket, a wife and seven children back on Council Street. He remembered moving home after the navy, working in a liquor store, sleeping on the porch again. Wouldn’t he try to spare me that? I wasn’t much of a student when I was young, and my career plans were pretentious—I dreamed of making a very small living from my art. Maybe all he could do was operate within the world he knew: Catholicism, the navy, the police department. Captains gave orders and sailors went to sea. Who was I but a swabbie? He’d taken orders and I would take orders. No one exists on paper and pens, alone in a room without anyone to tell them when to get up and what to eat and where to go and when to sleep.

    But I was a writer and nothing else, and to miss seeing me as such was to miss me altogether. I wrote and read and read and wrote. I stacked every egg I was ever given into a single basket. I can see how that would be unnerving for a parent.

    Did I tell you I loved my father, that he loved me? Contrary to popular belief, love does not need understanding to thrive. My father made me laugh more often than he made me want to strangle him. We hashed out articles we read in the New Yorker. We listened to arias and tried to guess the composers. Our very happiest times were spent on the two linen sofas that faced each other in the Rossmoyne house, drinking gin and tonics and reading Yeats aloud, passing the leather-bound volume back and forth. Who will go drive with Fergus now, / And pierce the deep wood’s woven shade, / And dance upon the level shore? This one, he would say, and read me The Lake Isle of Innisfree. Then he would hand me back the book and I would say, This one.

    But he also dragged us to the alley behind the grocery store at 6:00 a.m. so that we could hit tennis balls against the back wall of Ralph’s. I was no better at tennis than I was at volleyball, but my sister would hit and hit and hit. Every time he sent me down the alley to retrieve the scattered balls I thought, I’ll show you. I will not hit or play or join or score but I will write and I will show you.

    It turns out that having a hard wall to hit your tennis balls against is what gives them bounce. Having someone who believed in my failure more than my success kept me alert. It made me fierce. Without ever meaning to, my father taught me at a very early age to give up on the idea of approval. I wish I could bottle that freedom now and give it to every young writer I meet, with an extra bottle for the women. I would give them the ability both to love and not to care.

    I’m not saying you can’t have a hobby, he would say. Writing is a perfectly fine hobby. Just don’t think it’s your job. With the buffer of two time zones between us, his disapproval began to feel more like a joke over the years. I got an MFA from Iowa, a handful of fellowships, a smattering of prizes. I published stories, articles, three novels, and still he sent me notices for summer work on cruise ships. I had no money and never asked for money. I lived in a tiny apartment and drove an old car. I had neither children nor debt.

    My father read my stories, and then my books in manuscript. He helped me with research. He gave me notes. He was proud of me and good to me, he just didn’t think this thing I was doing was actually a job.

    What finally tipped the balance in my favor was something I’d never imagined: I became rich. Rich is a useless word, since everyone has her own definition, but in this case use mine: I had so much money I no longer knew exactly down to the last dollar how much I had. I could give money away without needing it back. I had written a book about opera and terrorism in South America that became very successful, and after that, my father changed. He now thought

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