Truth & Beauty

Ann Patchett is a successful American novelist, and Truth and Beauty is her memoir about her friendship with the poet, Lucy Grealy. She writes beautifully about Grealy, her talent and her warm, engaging personality, but also about her struggles and eventual death. Patchett conveys the depth of a passionate friendship by letting the reader see all her thoughts and feelings, courageously looking at how we can love someone, but how they can also try us to our limits. It is a book for those who love literature and are fascinated by the depth and intricacy of a creative connection between… show more.

Patchett is a sublime novelist, but this work of memoir is unbeatable, one of those books you find yourself gifting to friends and family as soon as you’ve finished it. Written soon after her dear friend, the poet Lucy Grealy, died too young, this is an account of their deep friendship over two decades. Though they had much in common, the story as it unfolds demonstrates how it is possible for two people to grapple with creative struggles and trauma very differently. We also felt Patchett captured some essential qualities of female friendship, so that we see Lucy through Ann’s… show more.

This is author Ann Patchett’s first book of non-fiction. It tells of two very different women who were the best of friends for over 20 years. Lucy Grealy, also a gifted writer, suffered from the effects of childhood cancer and chemotherapy. Her personality was larger than life. Ann, more low-key and grounded, was fiercely loyal and supportive to Lucy. I loved watching their lives unfold together until, in the end, Ann couldn’t save Lucy from the ravages of depression and addiction. 

In this memoir, the celebrated novelist Ann Patchett tells the story of her intense and troubling relationship with Lucy Grealy, author of the bestselling memoir, Autobiography of a Face. Grealy, whose face was disfigured by a sarcoma when she was young, died at 39 after years of restorative surgery, from what might, in the end, have been a drug overdose. Patchett likes to think of herself as a loving, self-sacrificing friend, but maybe, the narrative also suggests, the story is more complicated than she lets on. Despite her grief, the novelist struggles to determine what might have saved Lucy from… show more.