The chemo, the clinical trial, the yoga and the vegetables, the prayers of nuns and all the time to paint—what if it added up to something? Had it been a bad book or just a good-enough book, I would have put it down, but page after page it surprised me. They told me the story later: How after they landed, when they were all standing together on the lawn outside the small airport, a police officer came and told them they had to disperse. 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 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.

My cancer marker—CA 19-9—is nonspecific to pancreatic cancer (it can indicate other inflammation in the body), but it’s an indicator and is supposed to be at 35 U/L or less. This book of essays is very personal, many of them appearing in some form previously in The New Yorker or The Atlantic, as she talks about the relationships with her three fathers. 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.

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.

These Precious Days is a new collection of essays by Ann Patchett that make you think, make you feel, and may even make you cry.I’ve read all of her fiction and even though I’m not a huge nonfiction fan, I devoured her memoir and her previous essay collection. I wonder,” I said to her one night while we walked Sparky around the block, “do you think you’re a good assistant because you’re a private person, or did you become a private person because you’ve been an assistant for a long time?

Six years ago, I read Ann Patchett’s first collection of essays, This Is The Story Of A Happy Marriage.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.

Once I could see what I already had, and what actually mattered, I was left with a feeling that was somewhere between sickened and humbled. From the enchantments of Kate DiCamillo’s children’s books to youthful memories of Paris; the cherished life gifts given by her three fathers to the unexpected influence of Charles Schultz’s Snoopy; the expansive vision of Eudora Welty to the importance of knitting, Patchett connects life and art as she illuminates what matters most. Every day Sooki came upstairs looking spectacular—embroidered jeans, velvet tops, a different coat, a perfect scarf. I was so immersed in this book, I read it well into the evening, until it got too dark for me to able to see.

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. While many of these essays are preoccupied with death and mortality they ultimately struck me as life-affirming.