Book #10: This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett

Everything I've read by Ann Patchett has been the best. I love, love, love her beautiful writing style and how amazing her use of words is. Every time I read one of her books, I always mean to sit down and read more of them, until all the other books I have on my to-read list get in the way. This one has been on my list for a long, long time, and I've checked it out from the library more than once and had to return it without getting into it. This time, it's more than a week overdue and I just couldn't give it back without getting into it this time. I started it last night and finished it today--and absolutely loved it. This book, instead of being a complete novel or memoir, is a compilation of her nonfiction essays she'd written over the years (decades) and published in various magazines and journals. However, each of the chapters seem to work together to tell a complete story about her life, almost like this is a memoir that she happened to publish in pieces and separately over the years. I love the personal essay genre and Patchett has mastered it--a process she writes about in the introduction to the book, which was as interesting as the rest of the essays too. She writes different essays about her childhood, her dog, her bookstore, her writing process, her friend Lucy (who she wrote about in Truth and Beauty), her marriages and her husband. I loved it.