At Harper's Magazine, author Ann Patchett relates working with Tom Hanks, through which she meets and befriends his assistant, Sooki. After a series of emails, Sooki comes to live with Ann and her husband Karl in their early stages of the pandemic while receiving treatment for pancreatic cancer in Nashville, Tennessee. This is a beautiful essay, about the different shapes that friendship can take, and the limitations of truly knowing another human being, despite our best intentions.
When I'm putting together a novel, I leave all the doors and windows open so the characters can come in and just as easily leave. I don't take notes. Once I start writing things down, I feel like I'm nailing the story in place. When I rely on my faulty memory, the pieces are free to move. The main character I was certain of starts to drift, and someone I'd barely noticed moves in to fill the space. The road forks and forks again. It becomes a path into the woods. It becomes the woods. I find a stream and follow it, the stream dries up, and I'm left to look for moss on the sides of trees.
Putting together a novel is essentially putting together the lives of strangers I'm coming to know. In some ways it's not unlike putting together my own life. I think I know what I'm doing when in truth I have no idea. I just keep moving forward. By the time the book is written, there is little evidence of the initial spark or a long-ago conversation in California Pizza Kitchen.
This story—which begins and begins—starts again here. Of course we would exercise together; it was good for both of us. Kundalini is nothing if not an exercise in breath, and as it turned out, breath was what Sooki was craving. More breath. Almost from the moment we finished that first practice, she identified it as part of her recovery, the thing she needed to stay alive.
I had never found a way of asking what having cancer had been like for her, or what it meant to so vigorously refuse the hand you were dealt. With every passing day I seemed less able to say, Do you want to talk about this? Am I the person you're talking to, or are you talking to someone else downstairs late at night? I was starting to understand that what she needed might have been color rather than conversation, breath rather than words.
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