Compassion and a gift for friendship are touchingly evident in Ann Patchett’s These Precious Days

It has to be one of the most extraordinary stories of lockdown — how Tom Hanks’s assistant Sooki Raphael, undergoing treatment for recurrent pancreatic cancer, came to be living in the basement of the American novelist Ann Patchett and her husband Dr Karl VanDevender.

How it happened is told in the title story of These Precious Days, Patchett’s second collection of essays. Asked to endorse Hanks’s short story collection, Uncommon Type, and then to interview him on stage during his tour, Patchett first meets Sooki in the wings of a Washington theatre. Hanks, by way of reciprocation, agrees to do the audio recording of Patchett’s eighth novel, The Dutch House, and a ‘sporadic email exchange’ between Patchett and Sooki develops into a friendship. ‘Ours was an ephemeral connection common to the modern world,’ writes Patchett. ‘Except it was Sooki, and I liked her very much.’

When it becomes difficult for Sooki to find a hospital to deliver the clinical trial and chemo she needs, Patchett and VanDevender discover that it can be done at the hospital in their home town, Nashville. Sooki agrees to stay for a few nights. Then Covid strikes; 2020 is all but cancelled and it’s impossible for Sooki to go home. She’s there in Patchett’s basement for the rest of lockdown.

It’s undeniable that money and privilege are a great help. Patchett is part-owner of a bookstore (Parnassus), has a three-storey house and a husband who’s a longtime physician at the First Clinic in Nashville. (He also flies a Cessna plane, which comes in handy when Sooki’s mother is taken into hospital in New York.) But also undeniable are Patchett’s generosity of spirit, compassion and gift for friendship. (Her 2004 book, Truth and Beauty, describes a 17-year friendship with the brilliant but demanding writer, Lucy Grealy, also a cancer victim.