Truth & Beauty
A Friendship
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4.2 • 139 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This memoir of Patchett's friendship with Autobiography of a Face author Lucy Grealy shares many insights into the nature of devotion. One of the best instances of this concerns a fable of ants and grasshoppers. When winter came, the hard-working ant took the fun-loving grasshopper in, each understanding their roles were immutable. It was a symbiotic relationship. Like the grasshopper, Grealy, who died of cancer at age 39 in 2002, was an untethered creature, who liked nothing more than to dance, drink and fling herself into Patchett's arms like a kitten. Patchett (The Patron Saint of Liars; Bel Canto) tells this story chronologically, in bursts of dialogue, memory and snippets of Grealy's letters, moving from the unfolding of their deep connection in graduate school and into the more turbulent waters beyond. Patchett describes her attempts to be a writer, while Grealy endured a continuous round of operations as a result of her cancer. Later, when adulthood brought success, but also heartbreak and drug addiction, the duo continued to be intertwined, even though their link sometimes seemed to fray. This gorgeously written chronicle unfolds as an example of how friendships can contain more passion and affection than any in the romantic realm. And although Patchett unflinchingly describes the difficulties she and Grealy faced in the years after grad school, she never loses the feeling she had the first time Grealy sprang into her arms: " came through the door and it was there, huge and permanent and first."
Customer Reviews
Truth & Beauty
Truth & Beauty is such a beautiful book about growing in friendship and growing apart from friendship. As much as you always will still love a person, there is still going to come a time when being around that person isn't a priority. This book shows how the friendship between the author and her best friend Lucy, and fellow writer, loved each other but they still eventually grew apart. Lives go in different directions, and you can't be someone's everything. It showed that as much as Lucy was loved she still couldn't be saved, because her head was such an ugly place to be and she had to live with the childhood scars of being who she was and the constant change of her face. She was special because she was different, but that was also her curse. Many women can identify with the insecurity that Lucy was faced with, with the feeling of being unloved; lonely and worst of all ugly. Lucy could never let that go and eventually that had destroyed her.
Friends aren’t always easy especially the ones you love
Friendship, love, pain, hope, life all the stuff that breaks your heart.