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Truth & Beauty: A Friendship
"A loving testament to the work and reward of the best friendships, the kind where your arms can't distinguish burden from embrace." - People
New York Times Bestselling author Ann Patchett's first work of nonfiction chronicling her decades-long friendship with the critically acclaimed and recently deceased author, Lucy Grealy.
Ann Patchett and the late Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and, after enrolling in the Iowa Writer's Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work. In Gealy's critically acclaimed and hugely successful memoir, Autobiography of a Face, she wrote about losing part of her jaw to childhood cancer, years of chemotherapy and radiation, and endless reconstructive surgeries. In Truth & Beauty, the story isn't Lucy's life or Ann's life, but the parts of their lives they shared together. This is a portrait of unwavering commitment that spans twenty years, from the long cold winters of the Midwest, to surgical wards, to book parties in New York. Through love, fame, drugs, and despair, this is what it means to be part of two lives that are intertwined...and what happens when one is left behind.
This is a tender, brutal book about loving the person we cannot save. It is about loyalty and being uplifted by the sheer effervescence of someone who knew how to live life to the fullest.
New York Times Bestselling author Ann Patchett's first work of nonfiction chronicling her decades-long friendship with the critically acclaimed and recently deceased author, Lucy Grealy.
Ann Patchett and the late Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and, after enrolling in the Iowa Writer's Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work. In Gealy's critically acclaimed and hugely successful memoir, Autobiography of a Face, she wrote about losing part of her jaw to childhood cancer, years of chemotherapy and radiation, and endless reconstructive surgeries. In Truth & Beauty, the story isn't Lucy's life or Ann's life, but the parts of their lives they shared together. This is a portrait of unwavering commitment that spans twenty years, from the long cold winters of the Midwest, to surgical wards, to book parties in New York. Through love, fame, drugs, and despair, this is what it means to be part of two lives that are intertwined...and what happens when one is left behind.
This is a tender, brutal book about loving the person we cannot save. It is about loyalty and being uplifted by the sheer effervescence of someone who knew how to live life to the fullest.
Editorial Reviews
"More than truth or beauty, it is love" - San Francisco Chronicle
"This is a loving testament to the work and reward of the best friendships, the kind where your arms can't distinguish burden from embrace." - People
"Unforgettable...carefully rendered and breathtaking." - Chicago Sun-Times
"An inspired duet...riveting." - New York Times Book Review
"A work every bit as entrancing, daring and smart as her fiction-channels her grief.[into] an electrifying portrait of Grealy, a bravura self-portrait and a stunning and insightful interpretation of an epic friendship...A generous and virtuoso performance." - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"This frank, perceptive book can be read in many ways, not only as a story of friendship but also as a young artist's eye-opening introduction to the wider world." - New York Times
"If this honest book sends new readers out in search of Grealy's memoir, Patchett will have served her friend's memory well." - USA Today
"In her first nonfiction, novelist Patchett paints a deeply moving portrait of friendship between two talented writers, illuminating the bond between herself and poet Lucy Grealy...a tough and loving tribute, hard to put down, impossible to forget." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Dazzling in its psychological interpretations, piquant in its wit, candid in its self-portraiture, and gracefully balanced between emotion and reason, this is an utterly involving and cathartic elegy that speaks to everyone who would do anything for their soul mate." - Booklist (starred review)
"[Truth & Beauty] shares many insights into the nature of devotion...This gorgeously written chronicle unfolds as an example of how friendships can contain more passion and affection than any in the romantic realm." - Publishers Weekly
"...lyrical, lovely...Patchett has preserved her friend's talent in this book, and provided more evidence of her own." - BookPage
"{a} loving, clear-sighted portrayal.." - Elle
"A contemporary story of friendship and the writ...
"This is a loving testament to the work and reward of the best friendships, the kind where your arms can't distinguish burden from embrace." - People
"Unforgettable...carefully rendered and breathtaking." - Chicago Sun-Times
"An inspired duet...riveting." - New York Times Book Review
"A work every bit as entrancing, daring and smart as her fiction-channels her grief.[into] an electrifying portrait of Grealy, a bravura self-portrait and a stunning and insightful interpretation of an epic friendship...A generous and virtuoso performance." - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"This frank, perceptive book can be read in many ways, not only as a story of friendship but also as a young artist's eye-opening introduction to the wider world." - New York Times
"If this honest book sends new readers out in search of Grealy's memoir, Patchett will have served her friend's memory well." - USA Today
"In her first nonfiction, novelist Patchett paints a deeply moving portrait of friendship between two talented writers, illuminating the bond between herself and poet Lucy Grealy...a tough and loving tribute, hard to put down, impossible to forget." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Dazzling in its psychological interpretations, piquant in its wit, candid in its self-portraiture, and gracefully balanced between emotion and reason, this is an utterly involving and cathartic elegy that speaks to everyone who would do anything for their soul mate." - Booklist (starred review)
"[Truth & Beauty] shares many insights into the nature of devotion...This gorgeously written chronicle unfolds as an example of how friendships can contain more passion and affection than any in the romantic realm." - Publishers Weekly
"...lyrical, lovely...Patchett has preserved her friend's talent in this book, and provided more evidence of her own." - BookPage
"{a} loving, clear-sighted portrayal.." - Elle
"A contemporary story of friendship and the writ...
Readers Top Reviews
LeighcarrieSam Clark
Very uncomfortable read which I put down half way through. Read a couple of reviews, one by her friend’s mother. Why Patchett’s felt the need to lower herself to this I don’t know. I’m waiting for a while to read another one of her wonderful novels to get the bad taste out of my mouth.
The writing in this book is magnificent. Once you read it you will love Ann Patchett for the kind, caring human she is and want to read all her books. Her generosity and compassion for her friend Lucy is truly exquisite. Would we all have the capacity to love so completely and so selflessly. The underlying issue here is can we ever save someone from themselves? I do not think we can and I think the personal cost of trying as hard as Ann Patchett did is far too high.
Shelley C. Grossman
A captivating novel of two women’s lifelong friendship. A compelling story of their ups and downs as told by the author with letters from the other sprinkled in.
JAMJAZZ
This is a well written tragedy of realized and unrealized ambitions. The story of someone who attracted so much love from others but had none for herself. Someone constantly pushing the boundaries of her friendships until you wonder whether they actually mattered to her at all. A narcissist to the end!
lawyeraau
First and foremost, one should read the acclaimed memoir, “Autobiography of a Face” by Lucy Grealy, before reading this book. In it, Lucy tells her life story. When she was nine, her mandible was ravaged by Ewing’s sarcoma, a cancer that caused her to lose the jaw on the right side of her face. Though it was almost always fatal at the time, Lucy survived with years of grueling chemotherapy and radiation treatments, but her face was disfigured. Despite about thirty-eight grueling surgeries throughout her life to try to repair her ravaged face, she would forever look different. Her story was a compelling one, but also a revealing one. What she revealed was not pretty. Total self-absorption radiated throughout her book, overlaid by a miasma of unhappiness. A coldness and lack of empathy for others was readily apparent, even as to her own family, whom she barely mentioned, and then, almost reluctantly. It was a bit jarring. In interviews about her book, I found highly intelligent, but insufferable, as she was exactly as how she displayed on the pages of her own book. I was not all that surprised to later learn that she died at the age of thirty nine from an “accidental” drug overdose or as others would claim, a suicide. So, I was curious to see if this book by her long time friend and fellow author would shed any light that might change my view. I wanted to see the portrait that would be painted in words by another who knew Lucy well. Unfortunately, it only further reinforced my perception. It was consistent with the one drawn by Lucy herself. It should be noted that the author received a lot of grief from the Grealy family over the writing this book. They called her the “grief thief”. They suggested that she tricked them on the heels of their grief into signing over rights to Lucy’s letters (for which they were monetarily recompensed). That the author published this book about eighteen months after Lucy’s death was also cause for commentary by the family, suggesting that this was so the author, whom they called a “not so gifted writer”, could hitch herself to Lucy’s star. They were also angry that, for the most part, they really did not figure in this book. Then again, neither did they do so in Lucy’s own book, which bespeaks volumes. This author’s book is a telling one. Her portrait of her friend is consistent with that drawn by Lucy herself in her autobiography. That they were friends is clear, bound by their love/hate relationship with writing, though the friendship often seemed one sided. It also was odd, as it seemed to have almost sapphic overtones, at times. Still, there is clarity about who Lucy was as a person in this book, self-absorbed, with little or no thought for others, a complete lack of empathy, selfish to the max, highly intelligent, completely irresponsible, yet at the same time pitiable. Yet, Lu...
Short Excerpt Teaser
Truth & BeautyA FriendshipBy Patchett, AnnPerennialISBN: 0060572159
Chapter OneThe thing you can count on in life is that Tennessee will always be scorching hot in August. In 1985 you could also pretty much count on the fact that the U-Haul truck you rented to drive from Tennessee to Iowa, cutting up through Missouri, would have no air-conditioning or that the air-conditioning would be broken. These are the things I knew for sure when I left home to start graduate school. The windows were down in the truck and my stepsister, Tina, was driving. We sat on towels to keep our bare legs from adhering to the black vinyl seats and licked melted M&Ms off our fingers. My feet were on the dashboard and we were singing because the radio had gone the way of the air conditioner. "Going to the chapel and we're -- gonna get mar-ar-aried." We knew all the words to that one. Tina had the better voice, one more reason I was grateful she had agreed to come along for the ride. I was twenty-one and on my way to be a fiction writer. The whole prospect seemed as simple as that: rent a truck, take a few leftover pots and pans and a single bed mattress from the basement of my mother's house, pack up my typewriter. The hills of the Tennessee Valley flattened out before we got to Memphis and as we headed north the landscape covered over with corn. The blue sky blanched white in the heat. I leaned out the window and thought, Good, no distractions.
I had been to Iowa City once before in June to find a place to live. I was looking for two apartments then, one for myself and one for Lucy Grealy, who I had gone to college with. I got a note from Lucy not long after receiving my acceptance letter from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She said that initially when she heard I had gotten into the workshop she was sorry, because she had wanted to be the only student there from Sarah Lawrence. But then our mutual friend Jono Wilks had told her that I was going up early to find housing and if this was the case, would I find a place for her as well? She couldn't afford to make the trip to look herself and so it went without saying that she was on a very tight budget. I sat at the kitchen table and looked at her handwriting, which seemed oddly scrawny and uncertain, like a note on a birthday card from an elderly aunt. I had never seen her writing before, and certainly these were the only words she had ever addressed to me. While Lucy and I would later revise our personal history to say we had been friends since we met as freshmen, just for the pleasure of adding a few more years to the tally, the truth was we did not know each other at all in college. Or the truth was that I knew her and she did not know me. Even at Sarah Lawrence, a school full of models and actresses and millionaire daughters of industry, everyone knew Lucy and everyone knew her story: she had had a Ewing's sarcoma at the age of nine, had lived through five years of the most brutal radiation and chemotherapy, and then undergone a series of reconstructive surgeries that were largely unsuccessful. The drama of her life, combined with her reputation for being the smartest student in all of her classes, made her the campus mascot, the favorite pet in her dirty jeans and oversized Irish sweaters. She kept her head tipped down so that her long dark blond hair fell over her face to hide the fact that part of her lower jaw was missing. From a distance you would have thought she had lost something, money or keys, and that she was vigilantly searching the ground trying to find it.
It was Lucy's work-study job to run the film series on Friday and Saturday nights, and before she would turn the projector on, it was up to her to walk in front of the screen and explain that in accordance with the New York State Fire Marshal, exits were located at either side of the theater. Only she couldn't say it, because the crowd of students cheered her so wildly, screaming and applauding and chanting her name, "LOO-cee, LOO-cee, LOO-cee!" She would wrap her arms around her head and twist from side to side, mortified, loving it. Her little body, the body of an underfed eleven-year-old, was visibly shaking inside her giant sweaters. Finally her embarrassment reached such proportions that the audience recognized it and settled down. She had to speak her lines. "In accordance with the New York State Fire Marshal," she would begin. She was shouting, but her voice was smaller than the tiny frame it came from. It was no more than a whisper once it passed the third row.
I watched t...
Chapter OneThe thing you can count on in life is that Tennessee will always be scorching hot in August. In 1985 you could also pretty much count on the fact that the U-Haul truck you rented to drive from Tennessee to Iowa, cutting up through Missouri, would have no air-conditioning or that the air-conditioning would be broken. These are the things I knew for sure when I left home to start graduate school. The windows were down in the truck and my stepsister, Tina, was driving. We sat on towels to keep our bare legs from adhering to the black vinyl seats and licked melted M&Ms off our fingers. My feet were on the dashboard and we were singing because the radio had gone the way of the air conditioner. "Going to the chapel and we're -- gonna get mar-ar-aried." We knew all the words to that one. Tina had the better voice, one more reason I was grateful she had agreed to come along for the ride. I was twenty-one and on my way to be a fiction writer. The whole prospect seemed as simple as that: rent a truck, take a few leftover pots and pans and a single bed mattress from the basement of my mother's house, pack up my typewriter. The hills of the Tennessee Valley flattened out before we got to Memphis and as we headed north the landscape covered over with corn. The blue sky blanched white in the heat. I leaned out the window and thought, Good, no distractions.
I had been to Iowa City once before in June to find a place to live. I was looking for two apartments then, one for myself and one for Lucy Grealy, who I had gone to college with. I got a note from Lucy not long after receiving my acceptance letter from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She said that initially when she heard I had gotten into the workshop she was sorry, because she had wanted to be the only student there from Sarah Lawrence. But then our mutual friend Jono Wilks had told her that I was going up early to find housing and if this was the case, would I find a place for her as well? She couldn't afford to make the trip to look herself and so it went without saying that she was on a very tight budget. I sat at the kitchen table and looked at her handwriting, which seemed oddly scrawny and uncertain, like a note on a birthday card from an elderly aunt. I had never seen her writing before, and certainly these were the only words she had ever addressed to me. While Lucy and I would later revise our personal history to say we had been friends since we met as freshmen, just for the pleasure of adding a few more years to the tally, the truth was we did not know each other at all in college. Or the truth was that I knew her and she did not know me. Even at Sarah Lawrence, a school full of models and actresses and millionaire daughters of industry, everyone knew Lucy and everyone knew her story: she had had a Ewing's sarcoma at the age of nine, had lived through five years of the most brutal radiation and chemotherapy, and then undergone a series of reconstructive surgeries that were largely unsuccessful. The drama of her life, combined with her reputation for being the smartest student in all of her classes, made her the campus mascot, the favorite pet in her dirty jeans and oversized Irish sweaters. She kept her head tipped down so that her long dark blond hair fell over her face to hide the fact that part of her lower jaw was missing. From a distance you would have thought she had lost something, money or keys, and that she was vigilantly searching the ground trying to find it.
It was Lucy's work-study job to run the film series on Friday and Saturday nights, and before she would turn the projector on, it was up to her to walk in front of the screen and explain that in accordance with the New York State Fire Marshal, exits were located at either side of the theater. Only she couldn't say it, because the crowd of students cheered her so wildly, screaming and applauding and chanting her name, "LOO-cee, LOO-cee, LOO-cee!" She would wrap her arms around her head and twist from side to side, mortified, loving it. Her little body, the body of an underfed eleven-year-old, was visibly shaking inside her giant sweaters. Finally her embarrassment reached such proportions that the audience recognized it and settled down. She had to speak her lines. "In accordance with the New York State Fire Marshal," she would begin. She was shouting, but her voice was smaller than the tiny frame it came from. It was no more than a whisper once it passed the third row.
I watched t...
