What I have read is the title story, a novella, really, from Patchett’s book which is expected to be published in November 2021. Then there is the heart-achingly beautiful title essay about her friendship with Sooki, Tom Hanks' assistant, who comes to live with the author during the coronavirus pandemic to receive treatment for pancreatic cancer. When we turned out the light that night I felt myself buzzing with happiness: After nearly three months of lockdown, we were going to have an adventure. Sooki didn’t talk about her husband or her children or her friends or her employer; she talked about color. At the country club in Connecticut, the event organizers began to apologize as soon as we were through the door.

I was convinced it wouldn’t show up and embarked on a full-scale exploratory mission into holistic healing, prayer, juicing, yoga, meditation, sound waves, and magnetic magic (this last one, highly recommended by a friend, but in a clinic run by a reality-tv star). I read this essay today, previously published in Harper’s magazine about Ann Patchett’s friendship with Tom Hank’s assistant, Sooki Raphael. I know that after my last round of chemo I would sometimes get up and eat in the middle of the night, or get up early and make noisy smoothies.while reading, i felt like if i put my hand over my heart, i would be able to feel the warmth from this book. Yoga and meditation for an hour in the morning was augmented with yoga and meditation for an hour at night. Paying close attention to the text, and realizing that books can save you, those were the lessons I learned my freshman year of college when school was closed. C., if we hadn’t stayed in just enough contact for her to tell me a year after the fact that she had cancer, and if I hadn’t mentioned it to Karl, she wouldn’t have found her way to the only clinical trial in the country that both matched her cancer and could take her immediately. The same trial she was part of in Nashville had finally commenced at UCLA, twenty minutes from her house.

At first we’d rolled our eyes, but now I was wondering if it would be melodramatic to cancel my April book tour of Australia and New Zealand. When I asked her how she was feeling, she might admit to being a little tired or having a bit of a stomachache, nothing more than that.

But everyone showed up, all four hundred of them packed in side by side, every last chair in the ballroom occupied. Somehow I imagined that she had mentioned she was in a clinical trial in Nashville but not that she was living with us, which didn’t feel like too much of an evasion, seeing as how she managed to live with us in the quietest way imaginable. I think that what I love most about her essays is her humility and her love of books from the time she was a small child. Sooki came to Nashville and stayed in one place, no more movie stars, no more trips to Morocco and Tan-Tan. All that breathing and twisting and flexing fed her, and the calm voice of the instructor seemed to be speaking directly to her.

And then there are a group of essays that take on really profound issues: why she never wanted children (and why interviewers insist on tsk-tsking her about it), the illness and death of her father and, in the poignant title piece, the profound friendship she forged with Sooki, an artist and Tom Hanks’s assistant. The paintings came from a landscape of dreams, pattern on pattern, impossible colors leaning into one another. who wore a beautiful jacket the first day they met: black jacket with pink peonies, the size of a hand. Books, and authors gave Ann a glimpse as to what type of adult she might be in the area of love, sex, and work.I didn’t know what I would have done in her place, but I imagined that upon getting the news of recurrent pancreatic cancer I would go see my lawyer and settle up my tab with the house. I wasn’t suffering the crashing waves of anxiety that battered down so many people I knew—though two hours of daily yoga and meditation also contributed to keeping panic at bay. I now knew that she’d had a Whipple at Duke and twelve rounds of FOLFIRINOX followed by twenty-eight days of radiation over five and a half weeks at UCLA. I didn’t know how old she was, I couldn’t remember her face, but there have been few moments in my life when I have felt so certain: I was supposed to help.

Whether all of this together was what helped, or whether she had made up her mind to see only the good, I couldn’t say. I was packing boxes, writing cards, and making cheerful videos in which I extolled the virtues of the books I loved.If I knew nothing about Sooki before she arrived, I knew very little more three weeks later when we were spending all of our days together. She had once shown me a picture of herself standing in the surf wearing a bikini, a sarong tied around her narrow hips. And I would be remiss if I did not talk about the titled essay, These Precious Days is a very personal narrative about the close friendship that flourished between Ann Patchett and Sookie Raphael, the assistant to Tom Hanks.