Truth and Beauty: A Friendship

by Ann Patchett Narrated by Ann Patchett

Overview

""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.

Editorial Reviews

Janet Maslin

The beauty of this book is in the details, and in the anecdotes so colorfully recalled. There is Lucy's blind date with George Stephanopoulos, who answered her personal ad in The New York Review of Books. There is the time the two aspiring authors watched "Glengarry Glen Ross" in horror, wondering what life would be like if they held David Mamet-style jobs. And there is the way Ms. Grealy could move down the street, "everyone waving as if she were gliding past on a rose-covered float." The drive-in bank teller would say hello. Ms. Grealy, however much she loved attention, sighed and told Ms. Patchett: "That's not even my bank."
— The New York Times

Jocelyn McClurg

Truth & Beauty (the title comes from a chapter in Grealy's Autobiography) is heartbreaking, funny, disturbing, at times infuriating — just like the odd but endearing Lucy.
— USA Today

The New York Times Book Review

Truth & Beauty is a harrowing document, composed in a spare, forthright style very different from the elegant artifice of Patchett's best-known novels...It can be no surprise that the memoir of a friendship that ends in the premature death of a gifted writer does not make for cheerful reading. And yet there is much in Truth & Beauty that is uplifting, a testament to the perennial idealism and optimism of the young.—Joyce Carol Oates

Lisa Zeidner

… this memoir, dedicated to Grealy, is more love letter than autobiography. No reader will doubt the sincerity, or ferocity, of the love.
— The Washington Post

The New Yorker

Lucy Grealy attained prominence, in 1994, with “Autobiography of a Face,” a restrained account of acute disfigurement and continual surgery after a childhood tumor required the removal of much of her lower jaw. Grealy died of a heroin overdose in 2002, at the age of thirty-nine, and Patchett’s memoir of her friend, whom she first met in college, reveals a level of anguish that was submerged in Grealy’s book. Patchett sees herself as the hardworking ant to Lucy’s glamorous grasshopper, with her life in New York, countless friends, and a habit of finishing work at the last minute. But Grealy’s tremendous gift for friendship signalled a deep neediness and an inability to be alone that also made it difficult for her to sit down and write. If Patchett’s book doesn’t quite stand on its own, it is a moving companion to Grealy’s.

Kirkus Reviews

In her first nonfiction, novelist Patchett (Bel Canto, 2001, etc.) paints a deeply moving portrait of friendship between two talented writers, illuminating the bond between herself and poet Lucy Grealy. Although they were undergraduates together at Sarah Lawrence, it was not until 1981, when both were teaching and writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, that the young women's lives collided. As Patchett recounts it, the tiny Grealy (Autobiography of a Face, 1994) leaped into her arms. "It was not so much a greeting as it was a claim: she was staking out this spot on my chest and I was to hold her for as long as she wanted to stay." That image persists in their 20-year friendship; Grealy had a powerful hold on her many friends, Patchett included. A survivor of childhood cancer with a badly disfigured face and a frail body, Grealy struggled with enormous physical difficulties, bouts of depression, and money problems; she was also given to reckless sexual adventures. Early in their friendship, Patchett decided that she would not spend her time worrying about her friend; instead, she would show her love in actions. And she did so for the rest of Grealy's short life, providing shelter, paying bills, giving post-surgery care, cleaning up the messes. After Iowa, their lives took different paths, but their friendship remained strong. Patchett saved Grealy's letters to her and includes generous excerpts that make it easier to understand her commitment to her demanding friend. The letters reveal Grealy's warmth, her captivating intellect, her poet's eye. After her last round of surgery failed, she went from prescription painkillers to street heroin, and her life spiraled downward, but even whenGrealy was most devastated and difficult, Patchett still found her the person she knew best and was most comfortable with, the friend like no other to whom she could speak with "complexity and nuance."A tough and loving tribute, hard to put down, impossible to forget. Agent: Lisa Bankoff/ICM

From the Publisher

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 writing life at once intense, honest, and heartbreaking. Highly recommended.” — Library Journal (starred review)

“An exquisite account of the close yet painful friendship...This is an intimate look into the lives of two successful writers, and the psychological demands of an extremely close friendship that ultimately ends in tragedy.” — Chicago Tribune

“Patchett’s is a book with a vortex at the center, and it’s magnetic.” — Boston Globe

“The reader mourns not only the loss of Lucy but the loss one feels when the pages of an enthralling book begin to thin and, as if suddenly, there is no more to read.” — Wall Street Journal

“...a moving companion to Grealy’s [Autobiography of a Face].” — The New Yorker

Chicago Sun-Times

Unforgettable...carefully rendered and breathtaking.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

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.

New York Times Book Review

An inspired duet...riveting.

New York Times

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.

People

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.

USA Today

If this honest book sends new readers out in search of Grealy’s memoir, Patchett will have served her friend’s memory well.

San Francisco Chronicle

More than truth or beauty, it is love

Booklist (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.

Chicago Sun-Times

Unforgettable...carefully rendered and breathtaking.

San Francisco Chronicle

More than truth or beauty, it is love

USA Today

If this honest book sends new readers out in search of Grealy’s memoir, Patchett will have served her friend’s memory well.

Elle

{a} loving, clear-sighted portrayal..

BookPage

...lyrical, lovely...Patchett has preserved her friend’s talent in this book, and provided more evidence of her own.

Joyce Carol Oates—New York Times Book Review

An inspired duet...riveting.

Joyce Carol Oates—New York Times Book Review

An inspired duet...riveting.

New York Times Book Review - Joyce Carol Oates

"An inspired duet...riveting."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170324552
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	07/27/2004
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Truth & Beauty
A Friendship

Chapter One

The 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 this show almost every weekend. It was as great a part of the evening's entertainment as seeing Jules et Jim. Being shy myself, I did not come to shout her name until our junior year. By then she would wave to the audience as they screamed for her. She would bow from the waist. She had cut off her hair so that it was now something floppy and boyish, a large cowlick sweeping up from her pale forehead. We could see her face clearly. It was always changing, swollen after a surgery or sinking in on itself after a surgery had failed. One year she walked with a cane and someone told me it was because they had taken a chunk of her hip to grind up and graft into her jaw.

We knew things about Lucy the way one knows things about the private lives of movie stars, by a kind of osmosis of information ...

Truth & Beauty
A Friendship. Copyright © by Ann Patchett. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Videos