New to You: Ann Patchett recs Marion Winik

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-10

[00:00:00]Hi everybody, it's Ann Patchett at Parnassus Books and it's Friday. And if you haven't read this book, it's new to you. You really should read this book.

[00:00:08]This is a a little book which is called big. It's called The Big Book of the Dead by Marion Winik, but it's it's actually a very small book of the dead.

[00:00:17]Marion Winik is just an amazing force of creativity and good thinking in the world. And her book that started this was called The Glenrock Book of the Dead, in which she went back to Glenrock, Pennsylvania, where she had grown up and she wrote these very short essays. Each one is just a page or a page and a half about different people in Glenrock in her life who had died. And she wrote a just a a portrait of each of them. And then she moved to Baltimore and she then followed that book up with the Baltimore Book of the Dead. And then she combined those two books and added some more and made the Big Book of the Dead.

[00:01:03]So, there are a lot of people that this book will be applicable for. First, writing people. Writing stu- I started to say writing students, but actually that's not true. Anybody who's interested in writing because she manages in such a short space to completely flesh out a character and make you feel so connected to that person.

[00:01:29]Chekhov was also really good at that. If you can have a minor character who's just walking through your story and you make them feel like someone who's very important, that is a real trick in writing and that's something that she does. It's It's also just a beautiful book about life and connection and it's a beautiful book about grief and how the people in our lives who die never leave us and they are points of connection throughout the rest of our life. I mean, she talks about her mother's death, but also the death of her eye doctor when she was a kid and a cousin, but then also people who she didn't know who were important in her life, a realtor, all sorts of people. And it's the idea of giving everyone their full due. I love a book also that I can pick up and read maybe five of these and then put it down. I finish a novel and I think, I want to go back and read some of Marion's profiles again. And she says in here, the introductions are wonderful, that when she first started it, she would take a day and invite one memory of a dead person into her office and spend the day with them and write just a little thing about them. It's not an obituary. It's just super personal and beautiful and Marion's a wonderful writer. I love this book, Big Book of the Dead. Get one.