by Anna Nordberg

Every reader knows you can follow a good narrator anywhere — to the grocery store, to the DMV, to the chemo transfusion center, through birth and death. In writing, there is nothing more powerful than good company. And novelist Ann Patchett is, above all, marvelous company.

Her new essay collection, “These Precious Days,” gathers together revised versions of published essays and a few new ones, turning her extraordinary powers as a writer to the lovely, unremarkable business of day-to-day living — walking the dog, cleaning out the closets, cooking a Thanksgiving turkey, caring for a dying friend. Several essays exist in the same chronological period but do not intersect, creating a sort of narrative origami, with stories folding back on one another but not interlocking.

The backbone of the collection is her three longer essays — “Three Fathers,” “There Are No Children Here” and “These Precious Days.” All speak to different parts of Patchett’s identity as a writer, and “Three Fathers” (my favorite; everyone will have a different one) is the most explicit about the forces that made her the writer she is. Her dad never wanted her to be a writer, her stepdad never wanted her to be anything else, and her mother’s third husband, Darrell, is the only one who just loves and asks nothing of her. But none of these dads’ roles is as simple or has the impact you would imagine.

It was her father’s concern that writing was a one-way ticket to failure that “made me fierce,” Patchett writes. “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.” Amen to that. She is also clear that the disagreements with her father exist separately from their love. “Contrary to popular belief, love does not need understanding to thrive,” she writes.

In “There Are No Children Here,” Patchett describes her early, unshakable knowledge that she did not want to have kids. When she marries at 41, friends and acquaintances rush to tell her she still has time, and the essay — funny, deft, narratively rich — captures how unnerved our society is by women who are childless by choice, how uncomfortable it makes us when people don’t want the same things we do. Her friends’ husbands tell her she needs children, and “I suspect it had less to do with my best interests and more to do with the fact that I made them nervous walking around the world unencumbered. I was setting a bad example,” she writes.

The essay also gives us insight into one of Patchett’s hidden gifts as a writer — she does not give a fig about what other people think. “How I came not to care about other people’s opinions is something of a mystery even to me. I was born with a compass. It was the luck of the draw.”

Interestingly, the collection’s title essay is the only one I struggled with. It reveals the moving, headlong friendship between Patchett and Tom Hanks’ assistant Sooki (yes, you read that right), whom Patchett befriends when Hanks is recording the audiobook for one of her novels. Through many twists and turns, Sooki ends up quarantining with Patchett and her husband, Karl, during the beginning of COVID, so she can participate in a medical trial for pancreatic cancer.

Patchett is well aware of what she has here — a meditation on friendship with a woman who has terminal cancer during a lethal pandemic. But this essay felt less metabolized than her other work, as if the emotions had not yet cooled. Her hunger to capture Sooki on paper, knowing her subject is gold, practically smokes off the page, and that threw me. It’s a strange story, and a surprising one, taking a hard left at the end I didn’t see coming. Maybe that’s Patchett’s point. Even as a writer, you can think you’re in one story, and then suddenly you’re in another. As for me, I learned that contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to love a story to be desperate to know how it ends.

These Precious Days
By Ann Patchett
(HarperCollins; 320 pages; $26.99)