★★★★☆ | Essays, Writing, Memoir | Audio + Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I enjoy Ann Patchett’s novels, but I love her essays. She writes with such clarity and compassion. My first book of her essays was These Precious Days, which was written upfront as a collection of essays. This one came together after the fact as a compilation of essays Ann had written in magazines over many years. Only later did she decide to publish them as a book. As a result, there isn’t much of an underlying theme, other than Ann herself. I came for the essays on writing, but stayed for her views on RV life, dogs, opera, marriage, friendship, and defying all odds, the opening an independent bookstore in the post Amazon era. Ann narrated the audiobook, which added to the personal voice of these essays. After reading this and These Precious Days, I will basically read anything she writes.
Highlights
If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish, but because you long to learn how to write well, because there is something that you alone can say.
Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish, but because you long to learn how to write well, because there is something that you alone can say.
People like to ask me if writing can be taught, and I say yes. I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to write dialogue, maybe even how to construct a plot. But I can’t teach you how to have something to say.
Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life.
The little bookstore had succeeded and grown into a bigger bookstore. Seeing the potential for profit, the superstore chains rose up and crushed the independents, then Amazon rose up and crushed the superstore chains. Now that we could order any book at any hour without having to leave the screen in front of us, we realized what we had lost: the community center, the human interaction, the recommendation of a smart reader rather than a computer algorithm telling us what other shoppers had purchased. (Page 253)
Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It’s everything in between we live for.