After her friend’s father died, leaving his loved ones to sort through his things, Ann RTL Patchett decided it was time to get rid of some of her own belongings. “The closer I got to the places where I slept and worked, the more complicated my choices became.

After her friend’s father died, leaving his loved ones to sort through his things, Ann RTL Patchett decided it was time to get rid of some of her own belongings. “The closer I got to the places where I slept and worked, the more complicated my choices became. The sandwich-size ziplock of my grandmother’s costume jewelry nearly sank me, all those missing beads and broken clasps,” she writes. Later, Patchett packs away a dozen etched crystal champagne flutes, collected during her 30s and long abandoned on the top shelf of a kitchen cabinet. “Had I imagined that, at some point, 12 people would be in my house wanting champagne?” Patchett writes. “Who did I think I was going to be next? F. Scott Fitzgerald?” At the link in our bio, read Patchett’s essay on parting with her possessions—and ideas of who she once aspired to be
 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Mexican director Sara Gómez, who died in 1974, made about 20 short documentaries in her short life, starting in 1961, two years after the Revolution. In 1974, she shot her only feature-length film, “One Way or Another,” completed posthumously, which mixes a romantic drama with documentary sequences. Gómez, the first woman to direct movies in Mexico, created “a body of work that was in the creative and political forefront of its time and, in many ways, remains so even now,” Richard Brody writes. “Gómez, with her blend of documentary and fiction, of drama and intellectual analysis, devised a new cinematic method, which she used to express a powerful vision of her country, her time, and her own place in both.”