Truth and Beauty: A Friendship is the third book by Ann Patchett that I have read this year. This is a non-fiction story of her friendship with author Lucy Grealy.
In the second sentence of the book, Patchett describes going to grad school in 1985. I did a double-take, wait, what? I went off to grad school in 1985. Thus I learned that Patchett and I are the same age. The unfolding of the story, set across 20 years was then compared against what I was doing along the way.
The friendship was intense, enmeshed and ultimately codependent. Patchett’s mother told her to keep Grealy’s letters because she might use them one day. Alas, Grealy’s letters were indeed included to punctuate the story progression.
The level of detail about events and conversations was striking. I kept thinking, how could she have remembered all of that?
Grealy wrote a successful memoir, Autobiography of a Face, about losing part of her jaw to childhood cancer, the years of chemotherapy and radiation, and then the endless reconstructive surgeries. In one of her promotion tours, she was asked how she remembered everything. Grealy’s response was that she didn’t remember it. She wrote it, she was a writer.
This shocked the audience but she made her point that she was making art, not documenting an event. That she chose to tell her own extraordinary story was of secondary importance. her cancer and subsequent suffering had no made this book.she had made it. Her intellect and ability were in every sense larger than the disease.
This made me wonder if Truth and Beauty was also art and not a true documentation of the friendship.
Grealy began taking heroin and eventually over-dosed; Patchett’s behavior being classic codependent through the whole addiction. Tragic.
Since I’ve read 3 Patchett books in a year, I sense that this is an author where I will find my way to reading all of her stories.
