I got my mom into reading Patchett’s novels, and she got me into this essay collection! She couldn’t stop talking about it, and I can see why. We both found a lot of her writing incredibly relatable. It feels very much “of this moment,” like something I could read again 20 years down the line and remember clearly how it felt to be a human in 2021/2022. Patchett does a good job of balancing telling her own stories and commenting on our world, using the two paths together to make a great assortment of stories. Some essay collections go too much into memoir and start being less interesting to me, but every single story here resonated with me. I love everything Ann Patchett does!