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jesse_the_kI adored Ann Patchett's early fiction — The Magician’s Assistant, The Patron Saint of Liars, Bel Canto, and Run. I was fascinated by the parallel experiences of reality gained from Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face in conversation with Patchett’s meditation on their friendship, Truth & Beauty.
But she fell off my radar. Then this outstanding 20,000 word essay fell into my eyes
These Precious Days in January 2021 Harper’s Magazine
It’s got a big twist, just like she enjoys writing in her novels. It takes its form from the current moment, so there’s lockdowns and air travel and Tom Hanks and more air travel. Along the way Ann encounters Hanks’ assistant Sooki. Ann recognizes that Sooki radiates beauty and competence, and offers her a place to stay during cancer treatment. In return, they develop a true friendship. It’s heartening to learn these magic moments can still lie ahead.
When I’m putting together a novel, I leave all the doors and windows open so the characters can come in and just as easily leave. I don’t take notes. Once I start writing things down, I feel like I’m nailing the story in place. When I rely on my faulty memory, the pieces are free to move. The main character I was certain of starts to drift, and someone I’d barely noticed moves in to fill the space. The road forks and forks again. It becomes a path into the woods. It becomes the woods. I find a stream and follow it, the stream dries up, and I’m left to look for moss on the sides of trees.
[… snip …]
Every day Sooki came upstairs looking spectacular—embroidered jeans, velvet tops, a different coat, a perfect scarf. No outfit ever showed up twice. “How is it possible?” I said as I complimented her again and again. “You must have Mary Poppins’s suitcase.”
“The clothes are small,” she said. “And I roll them all up. I’m a good packer.” She told me she had packed for good cheer, having had the reasonable expectation that times would be hard and cheer a necessity.
[… snip …]
I had never found a way of asking what having cancer had been like for her, or what it meant to so vigorously refuse the hand you were dealt. With every passing day I seemed less able to say, Do you want to talk about this? Am I the person you’re talking to, or are you talking to someone else downstairs late at night? I was starting to understand that what she needed might have been color rather than conversation, breath rather than words.
> [… snip …]
She took off her cap to show me the damage. It was as if 98 percent of her hair had fallen out, but somehow in the process, it had felted. The chemical tide that rose in Sooki’s blood had not only caused her hair to fall out; it caused that hair to mat into a solid surface. Small, flat islands of boiled wool were resolutely attached to her scalp by the 2 percent of hair that had not fallen out. It was a science experiment that could never be replicated.
> [… snip …]
“First the tornadoes,”
“Then the pandemic,” I said.
“The freak wind,” Karl said.
“And pancreatic cancer,” Sooki said.
“Let’s not forget the cancer,” I said, and we laughed.