Several of the essays focus on family matters that affected Patchett’s career as a writer. This essay is an excellent counter to the boneheaded notion that children’s books should never make children feel sad or scared or lost - books are the very things, Patchett writes, that have the power to teach children to be brave enough to cope with pain. In “Reading Kate DiCamillo,” Patchett writes about meeting the beloved children’s author and deciding to read one of her books, even though “in my adult life I’d never made a habit of reading children’s literature.” The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane so bowls her over she reads all of DiCamillo’s books, culminating in a mystical experience with The Magician’s Elephant. “It had never occurred to me that Welty was accurately representing a culture until I married into that culture myself.” In Patchett’s wonderful introduction to a new edition of The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, she writes that she first thought the great Southern writer was a fabulist. Many of the essays, of course, focus on writing, her own and other people’s. After his death, for a whole summer, she helps Tavia spend weekends clearing it all out, “to bear witness to the closing down of a world that had helped shape me.” And they swear to each other never to leave such a chore to anyone else. Needing less is also a theme in “How to Practice,” about helping her childhood friend Tavia clean out the condominium Tavia’s father had lived in since the 1970s - and apparently not thrown anything away the whole time. “What I needed was less than I had,” she writes, so she devises a plan for what to stop buying and learns some surprising lessons along the way.
Patchett likes the idea, but it comes back full force in 2016, when “our country had swung in the direction of gold leaf.” She can’t focus on writing or reading, and “in my anxiety I found myself mindlessly scrolling through two particular shopping websites, numbing out with images of shoes, clothes, purses and jewelry.” She’s been an adult for a while when she chooses “My Year of No Shopping.” A friend had done it a few years before, making no unnecessary purchases for a year.
The dinner is less than perfect, and the university turns off the heat in the dorms so they all have to huddle around the gas oven for warmth, but the evening, she writes, was “brilliant,” marking the first time she saw herself as an adult.
“Why would someone who didn’t know how to cook think that this is what Thanksgiving required?” she writes. She cooks every single thing from scratch. She checks The Joy of Cooking out of the library, goes shopping and invites five other kids (after liberating some flatware from the cafeteria). Her cooking skills are rudimentary, but her confidence is that of the young.
In “The First Thanksgiving,” Patchett recounts being a 17-year-old college student stranded in her dorm for the holiday. A pair of shorter essays early in the book are apt for the season.