It’s clear that friendship is so valuable to AP and once a friend it seems you are a friend for life. The world asks us to engage, and for the most part we can, but given the choice we’d rather stay home.

There were so many other people who would have done anything to be with her—her mother and husband, her daughter and son and grandchildren, her sisters and all of her friends. She had said almost nothing and yet my eye kept going to her, the way one’s eye goes to the flash of iridescence on a hummingbird’s throat. 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. But it is in her nonfiction that she has more visibly reckoned with loss, whether it is Truth and Beauty, her memoir of her friendship with the late poet Lucy Grealy, or the pieces in her 2013 essay collection, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, about being a caregiver to her grandmother. Surely we would take off the Wednesday mornings when she had to be at the hospital at seven o’clock.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.

He would bring us with his own two small girls, and the four of us would sit in the coils of snaking power cords backstage and fall asleep in dressing rooms, in this very dressing room. I once invited the daughter of a woman who ran a lecture series in Pittsburgh to live with us when she found a job in Nashville and couldn’t find an apartment.While they all enriched her life in so many ways, I loved the relationship with her father that she only saw one week a year as she was growing up as she and her sister, Heather, flew to California, all of them crying unconsolably as they had to part. The titular essay, “These Precious Days,” refers to her unexpected friendship with a woman named Sooki Raphael (Tom Hanks’s assistant) who stayed with her and her husband for cancer treatments in 2020 while the world was shut down. Sookie needed the same things—to find somebody who could see each other’s best and most complete selves.