Truth & Beauty: A Friendship (edition 2005)

I think I loved reading this book while I was reading it, but I don't remember it fondly. I didn't keep it. I think I identified too strongly with Ann Patchett, and that was uncomfortable.

Reading this book made me go right out and buy Lucy Grealy's "Autobiography of a Face," which I know I did not enjoy at all. And I might have, had I not just read "Truth and Beauty." ( )

I think I loved reading this book while I was reading it, but I don't remember it fondly. I didn't keep it. I think I identified too strongly with Ann Patchett, and that was uncomfortable.

Reading this book made me go right out and buy Lucy Grealy's "Autobiography of a Face," which I know I did not enjoy at all. And I might have, had I not just read "Truth and Beauty." ( )

Ann Patchett has written an amazingly candid memoir of her intense and complicated, frustrating but rewarding friendship with Lucy Grealy, the celebrated author of Authobiography of a Face. The two women knew each other, vaguely, as undergraduates at Sarah Lawrence, became instant “best friends” as graduate students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and, up until Lucy’s death of a drug overdose in 2002, were intricately, perhaps even obsessively, involved in each other’s personal and professional lives. Truth & Beauty: A Friendship is a paean to that involvement, an intimate tracing of a kind of commitment and care that seem rare in any relationship, let alone a relationship between two ambitious, potentially rivalrous writers. It is essentially a love story, a narrative at once heartbreakingly tender and fiercely frank, which Patchett tells with an extraordinary deftness of touch and tone.

Lucy was not an easy person. Nor could one expect her to be. She had lost a good part of her left jaw to cancer as a child, endured painful rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, suffered through thirty-odd reconstructive surgeries, most of which did nothing to "repair" her face nor allow her to eat easily or much. But worse than these, she was forced to live with the unrelenting cruelty of people who mocked or recoiled from her "ugliness". This harrowing experience is what she set down in the award-winning memoir that put her on the map as a writer, a book that, for a time, brought her celebrity and wealth but couldn’t finally sustain her in a world which values and rewards only conventional beauty. Lucy needed more than fame; she wanted love. And while she certainly found a heroic species of that in Patchett, she wanted the full-blown romantic version as well. Extravagant, audacious, mercurial, Lucy was enormously attractive as a personality, but that did not satisfy her longing to be loved “as a woman.” Her brilliance and wit, her ability to galvanize and entertain any crowd, could not keep her from paralysing bouts of loneliness and depression or, in the end, from a lethal addiction to heroin.

And yet, in spite of the steady downward tug on her life, there was much joy in it too, and much to celebrate. Patchett does justice to this side of Lucy, showing her huge appetite for experience, her refusal to play it all as tragedy. The two women (in Patchett’s view a classic pairing of her plodding tortoise with Lucy’s breathless hare) drink and dance, write and travel. They console each other while trying to get a publisher, get a fellowship, or get a boyfriend, and toast each other when they finally make it into print or into Yaddo or into bed. But Patchett’s sad awareness that she can not “save” this talented and vibrant individual casts a real poignancy over this wonderfully shaded portrait of a difficult but beautiful friendship. ( )

An interesting insight into two writers: one a poet, the other a novelist. A complicated relationship layered with friendly rivalries, jealousies and the mutual bolstering of egos with love and a belief in the power of creativity and words, this well-written portrait traces one friendship's rise and fall. ( )

I expected something more like a biography of Lucy Grealy. I don't know why. Nothing in the description necessarily should have suggested that to me, but that's what I expected. What I found, however, was more the biography of a friendship. Patchett writes honestly and poignantly about her decades-long friendship with Lucy Grealy and how this relationship and the loss of it shaped her life. It helped me see both what I want in a friendship with another woman and what I don't want. And it helped me to better see how much influence the people I'm close to have in my life.

From a technical standpoint, I really liked the structure of the memoir. The mixture of correspondence and recollection flowed well and wasn't tied strictly to the chronological, just like our recollections of our lives aren't often strictly chronological. We juxtapose the parts that seem to go together in order to highlight the particular meaning they have for us. As always, I loved reading about the writers' lives, especially seeing how very differently two brilliant writers went about being brilliant. ( )