I flew to New York early the next morning, took a car to New Jersey, signed several hundred books, attended a cocktail-party fund-raiser for the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, gave a talk in a crowded town hall, got to my hotel room in Manhattan at midnight, got up in the morning to tape a segment for the Today show, then was back on a plane. In the case of The Dutch House, I’d started to think about a poor woman who suddenly became rich, and because she was unable to deal with the change in circumstances, she left her family and went to India to follow a guru. I would love to stay with you for my first night or two in Nashville—it would be wonderful to spend some time with you. I’d practiced kundalini devotedly for years and then drifted, picking up other things, and while I’d stuck with the short class, I had amassed no end of DVDs.

The Dutch House and The Magician's Assistant are absolute favourites of mine and I’ve also loved her previous collection of essays, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, which managed to bring me hope during one of my ‘down in the doldrums' phases. I told her about a friend of mine who worked as an assistant for a hedge-fund manager in New York, and how she parked every piece of herself at the door when she went to work in the morning. I hear you, and I know that if I were in your shoes and you were asking me to stay with you it would seem impossible.Where you imagination allows you to truly believe in what you’re reading, even though you know it isn’t true. High-dose psilocybin produced large decreases in clinician- and self-rated measures of depressed mood and anxiety, along with increases in quality of life, life meaning, and optimism, and decreases in death anxiety. I knew there was a part of her that believed that maybe what Nashville had to offer in terms of fighting cancer was happening in our house, that she was improving because she was with us. It had been languishing in a pile by the dresser for a while, and I’d left it there because of an unarticulated belief that actors should stick to acting.

Sitting there in her shaggy pink rock-star coat, Sooki told me how much she’d come to hate the cold.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. The titular essay, “These Precious Days,” refers to her unexpected friendship with a woman named Sooki Raphael (Tom Hanks’s assistant) who stayed with her and her husband for cancer treatments in 2020 while the world was shut down. I might have made the choice to let it go unmentioned had there been something else to talk about, maybe his mother or my mother or the spigot that had frozen in the garage. It turned out that Tom and Rita came to town something less than regularly but more than I would have thought. The cell-phone case also served as her wallet, containing her credit cards, cash, IDs, insurance cards—everything important.

Twenty-two essays (plus an introduction and epilogue) that were written during the COVID lockdown, when she found writing fiction impossible but still needed to put pen to paper. Yet I found myself ignoring the missteps, the saccharine detours, because they stem from the same impulse that enables the more engaging passages: the wish to let the heart “remain open to everyone, everyone, all the time”. One of my very favorite short story or essay collections is To Lay to Rest Our Ghosts by Caitlin Hamilton Summie, and These Precious Days is right up there at the top. Patchett ponders this truth as she explores family, friendship, marriage, failure, success, and what it all means. She and Tom would walk in the desert in the early mornings and she would feed him lines from a script while he memorized his part, cobras skating through the dust just in front of them.These three very different men shaped her, and a few pages into the chapter I was already overwhelmed and started to tear up. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart.

She hadn’t lost her hair on FOLFIRINOX, though she’d lost her sense of taste and smell, the feeling in her feet and hands, and twenty pounds. Sooki had two young grandchildren in San Diego and made plans to bring them to an event I was doing there, but they didn’t show.The power was out for four days, those rarest of days in Nashville when it was neither too hot nor too cold. She’d fallen down some stairs outside of church the night before and twisted her foot and now that foot was swollen and sore. I have limited time as I work til mid May, then leave the US in June until I come back to start another movie in September. Most mornings, Sooki set out in the darkness to walk the two miles to a power-yoga class that started at six-thirty, despite the presence of my car keys on the kitchen counter and explicit instructions to drive.