More news about planes: friends of mine in Nashville who knew what was going on with Sooki, and who have a house in California and a jet that takes them there, the nicest possible friends, offered her a ride home. I need to go home,” she said, looking at the pictures of herself she had asked me to take with her cell phone. 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. A more careful selection, for instance, might have let Flight Plan alone sum up Patchett’s rapport with her husband, and left the two other essays on their relationship out.

I had pictured her going through this alone, a conclusion I reached on account of a lack of information and a florid imagination. She told me she thought she’d put too much of her creative energy into her outfits over the years since she had stopped painting, though she might have said it to make me feel better. This wasn’t about an inability to get good medical care; it was about not being able to find a clinical trial that both matched her cancer and could accept her immediately. She told me she had packed for good cheer, having had the reasonable expectation that times would be hard and cheer a necessity. After finishing this collection, I feel as though Ann (I think she'd agree we're on a first name basis) and I are friends; or at least, I'd love if that were so.The last few months, the oncologists were watching the numbers and Western medicine offered nothing to do but to wait and see where the cancer showed up. Sooki is flying to Memorial Sloan Kettering in NY (she lives in LA), looking for a clinical trial or something. I had breakfast with my editor and agent and publicist, and when we were finished they each decided not to go back to the office after all.

The one I found most interesting as a reader was “Cover Art”, on how covers are chosen and how much input is allowed an author. The fact that the two of you want me here, that you love me, that you believe in me—it makes me believe in myself.She painted as fast as she could get her canvases prepped, berating herself for falling asleep in the afternoons. First the tornadoes,” Sooki said, taking picture after picture, the giant root systems pulling up slabs of earth taller than Karl, the bright spring grass meeting the sidewalk at right angles. Every day Sooki came upstairs looking spectacular—embroidered jeans, velvet tops, a different coat, a perfect scarf.

It’s like you’re going home to the Ukraine for the first time in ten years,” I said as we loaded up coolers and bags. I also have a hard cover copy of the book and love Sooki's stunning paintings on the glossy front and back cover. 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. Patchett ponders this as she explores family, friendship, marriage, failure, success, and what it all means. I had invited someone I didn’t know to live with us for an undetermined length of time, and I was leaving the day after she arrived, leaving it all to Karl.It’s an essay about the complexity of life and relationships, of how we each have something different to offer each other at various stages in our life. I told Sister Nena the whole story while we sat in the waiting room, her foot propped up on a wheelchair. I told them that when I was a child, my sister and I would come to the Ryman on Friday and Saturday nights with the man who was then the house doctor at the Opry. My official badge-carrying title at the New York City Department of Health’s Bureau of Animal Affairs was ‘public-health sanitarian.

When Tom Hanks agrees to do the audiobook of The Dutch House, Patchett forges a connection with his assistant, Sooki, a connection that transcends schedules and logistics and blossoms into a life-changing friendship. Had I known she had a husband, might I have assumed that she was taken care of and so not followed the story as closely? I feel like I could pop into Trader Joe’s and have them replaced with those happy little stickers they hand out to well-behaved children—it undermines my confidence in the sophisticated nature of the whole process just a bit. 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. I thought about how extraordinarily famous you would have to be to have someone like that working as your assistant.Patchett first met her when she wrote an endorsement for his book of stories, Uncommon Type, and they developed a warm friendship via e-mail. The caps were in the Mary Poppins suitcase, along with her paints and easel, the large blanket she had brought us as a gift, and her extensive wardrobe. She married her second husband, Karl, after 11 years of dating; he is 16 years her senior and a medical doctor who earned a master’s in philosophy and theology at Oxford. It took me a few weeks to figure this out but soon I could track it, the way her voice got quieter, the way she was less likely to look me in the eye. 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.