Lit and Life

Truth and Beauty: a friendship by Ann Patchett

Read by Ann Patchett

8 hours 6 minutes

Published 2004 by HarperCollins

Publisher’s Summary: 

What happens when the person who is your family is someone you aren't bound to by blood? What happens when that person is not your lover, but your best friend? In her frank and startlingly intimate first work of nonfiction, Truth & Beauty, Ann Patchett shines light on the little-explored world of women's friendships and shows us what it means to stand together.

Ann Patchett and 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 her critically acclaimed memoir, Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy wrote about the first half of her life. 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 20 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.

This is a tender, brutal book about loving the person we cannot save. It is about loyalty and about being lifted up by the sheer effervescence of someone who knew how to live life to the fullest.

My Thoughts: 

As you’re well aware, I’m a huge fan of Ann Patchett’s fiction writing and I loved her essay collection This Is The Story Of A Happy Marriage. But I might like her even better as a human being. Not that I actually know her, but I do watch her every posts every week. Did you know that when Nashville was hit with the ice storm last week, Patchett paid for the hotel bills of every employee who had to leave their home due to lack of power and paid employees even if they couldn’t get into the store. The store remained open every day as a place people could come to warm up. That’s a good human. 

She was also an incredible friend to Lucy Grealy, a woman who, in my opinion, often made it difficult. Lucy could be very self-centered and was terrible roommate. She took out loans she had no intention of ever paying back, wouldn’t do any work that wasn’t writing, fretted incessantly about never finding love or not getting the grants or positions she wanted. To be fair, Lucy’s life was tough – she was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma which led to the removal of part of her jawbone; in an effort to repair the damage caused by that and chemotherapy, Lucy underwent dozens of surgeries. She suffered from the cruelty of children while in school and adults when she was older. 

Patchett and Grealy were only slightly familiar with each other when they became roommates at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, but Patchett had admired Grealy in college. Grealy had that “it” factor that seemed to draw people to her and Patchett was no exception. As roommate the two agreed that Patchett would do all of the cooking and cleaning while Grealy would leave plates of food on the floor and borrow Patchett’s clothes without asking. But Lucy was fun and Patchett needed someone to pull her off of her straight and narrow path and into the fun. Lucy loved Ann and it’s hard not to love someone back who loves you so much they jump into your arms regularly. 

Over the next nearly two decades the two stayed incredibly close and Patchett traveled regularly to spend time with Grealy. But Grealy began to check in less and less often as her depression deepened and then her addition to oxycontin and heroin consumed her. Patchett began more and more to have to mother Grealy, to be the voice of reason. In those final years, loving her became more and more difficult. Still, two years after losing Lucy, when this book was published, Patchett was clearly still grieving and feeling that Grealy was worth the hard times. 

This is an incredible story of love and friendship, written beautifully. Read by Patchett, it becomes all the more heartfelt and heartbreaking.