Monday, April 04, 2005
Ann Patchet's "Truth & Beauty" (a friendship)
An accidental find
I knew of Ann Patchet. Her "Bel Canto" was selected for reading by the book group to which my friend JHL belongs. She liked it but I never got around to reading it.
Ann Patchet was not on my mind when I came across "Truth & Beauty" (published by Harper-Collins) while browsing the non-fiction shelves of new books in the local libary. Perhaps it is a book that would appeal more to women readers than to men. I thought it was great. The synopsis from the book jacket is copied below.
"What happens when the person who is your family is someone you aren't bound to by blood? What happens when the person you promise to love and to honor for the rest of your life is not your lover, but your best friend? In Truth & Beauty, her frank and startlingly intimate first work of non- fiction, Ann Patchett shines a fresh, revealing light on the 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 Writers' Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work was. In her critically acclaimed and hugely successful memoir, Autobiography of a Face , Lucy Grealy wrote about losing part of her jaw to childhood cancer, the years of chemotherapy and radiation, and then the 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. 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 book shows us what it means to be part of two lives that are intertwined.
This is a tender, brutal book about loving a 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. "
"Nothing lasts, and yet nothing passes, either
And nothing passes just because nothing lasts."
---Philip Roth, The Human Stain (quoted by Ann Patchet in Truth & Beauty)
