From Publishers Weekly
This memoir of Patchett's friendship with Autobiography of a Face author Lucy Grealy shares many insights into the nature of devotion. One of the best instances of this concerns a fable of ants and grasshoppers. When winter came, the hard-working ant took the fun-loving grasshopper in, each understanding their roles were immutable. It was a symbiotic relationship. Like the grasshopper, Grealy, who died of cancer at age 39 in 2002, was an untethered creature, who liked nothing more than to dance, drink and fling herself into Patchett's arms like a kitten. Patchett (The Patron Saint of Liars; Bel Canto) tells this story chronologically, in bursts of dialogue, memory and snippets of Grealy's letters, moving from the unfolding of their deep connection in graduate school and into the more turbulent waters beyond. Patchett describes her attempts to be a writer, while Grealy endured a continuous round of operations as a result of her cancer. Later, when adulthood brought success, but also heartbreak and drug addiction, the duo continued to be intertwined, even though their link sometimes seemed to fray. This gorgeously written chronicle unfolds as an example of how friendships can contain more passion and affection than any in the romantic realm. And although Patchett unflinchingly describes the difficulties she and Grealy faced in the years after grad school, she never loses the feeling she had the first time Grealy sprang into her arms: "[She] came through the door and it was there, huge and permanent and first." Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–Lucy Grealy, whose Autobiography of a Face (HarperCollins, 1995) found critical acclaim as well as a popular readership, died two years ago. Patchett first met the poet in college, became her roommate in graduate school, and remained devoted to her through years of artistic, medical, economic, and emotional upheavals. The ties binding these two women included resolve to meet physical adversity with energy and to place friendship beyond the reaches of either habit or convenience. Patchett moves the story from their acclimation to one another through her friend's lifelong desire to gain a reconstructed face and the lengths to which she went in search of what she'd lost to childhood cancer, to Grealy's ultimate slide into drugs and suicidal ideations. Patchett's own self-perception as the straight arrow to her friend's daredevilry is disclosed across time, as is Grealy's increasingly frenetic chase for a reconstructed face and, as important, for fame earned through writing. In spite of the story unfolding through the years between college and near middle age, teenage girls will find it accessible and engaging. The author's clear-eyed depiction of the writer's life as requiring gigs waiting tables and suburban tract housing is refreshingly honest. She includes details of more glamorous moments as well; this is no cautionary tale, but a celebration of friendship and of craft.–Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
When she sold her first novel, Ann Patchett's first phone calls were to her best friends, "because what good is news without girlfriends?" The women in question were writers themselves, but literary jealousy did not prevent them from exulting in her good fortune. What's most surprising about Truth & Beauty: A Friendship, Patchett's first book of nonfiction, is that a book about writers could be so sweet. These may be the best-natured, most loyal and generous, most optimistic writers ever to have their humble beginnings recounted in a memoir.Or at least Patchett herself is. Lucy Grealy, her best friend, had ample reason for a darker side. In her own memoir, Autobiography of a Face, Grealy documented her battle with Ewing's sarcoma, a rare cancer that caused her to lose part of her jaw as a child and undergo endless painful (and ultimately unsuccessful) surgeries for the disfigurement. Grealy died in 2002, at age 39, of a heroin overdose. Truth & Beauty is Patchett's tribute to Grealy, at once a grief-haunted eulogy and a larger meditation on the solace -- and limitations -- of friendship.Patchett and Grealy were best friends from the moment they became roommates at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1981. They shared a depressing apartment, bought spaghetti with their last pooled pennies and got smashed at local bars, where they talked deep into the night about "King Lear" and, of course, sex. "Iowa City in the eighties was never going to be Paris in the twenties," Patchett writes, "but we gave it our best shot."If it weren't for Grealy's inability to eat as most of us do -- she couldn't chew because she had lost most of her teeth to the cancer -- she could have been any coed, wondering aloud if she'd ever find a good man. Patchett and Grealy were committed to being artists -- "We were all going to be something big, something important" -- but they still managed to spend immense chunks of time bemoaning their love lives. Anyone who has read excerpts from Sylvia Plath's diaries will be familiar with this goofy balance of ambition and flat-out boy-craziness.The nature of the unlikely friendship, too, will strike a chord with many readers. Patchett, the hick from Tennessee, was even-keeled, reliable, punctual, a neat-freak. Manhattan club-hopper Grealy was the drama queen: extravagant, adventuresome but also occasionally gloomy, needy, possessive. "We were a pairing out of an Aesop's fable, the grasshopper and the ant, the tortoise and the hare. . . . Grasshoppers and hares find the ants and the tortoises. They need us to survive, but we need them as well. They were the ones who brought the truth and beauty to the party, which Lucy could tell you as she recited her Keats over breakfast, was better than food any day."Patchett traces Grealy's grim deterioration without sentimentality. The most interesting sections of Truth & Beauty confront that old subject, the relationship of suffering to art. Grealy, Patchett says, did not relish being the brave poster child for cancer survival. Among the letters from Grealy included in the book are two spectacular ones -- about Primo Levi's memoir Survival at Auschwitz and about Jean-Michel Basquiat's paintings -- that reveal the depth of her intellect.From Patchett's challenging fiction, we know that she must have matched Grealy insight for insight. But Patchett does not include her own letters here. And although Patchett, a nurse's daughter, was always there for Grealy -- fetching her Krispy Kreme donuts, sorting and paying her bills, literally carrying her home from the hospital -- there's no bragging about her selflessness. She portrays herself as merely one link in the sturdy chain of her charismatic friend's support system, which included novelist Elizabeth McCracken and poet Lucie Brock-Broido.Indeed, if anything, Truth & Beauty is a little too modest about dwelling on the author's artistic trajectory and inner life. "Sometimes," Patchett muses, "I worried that Lucy saw me as the ant I was, unglamorous, toiling." At one desperate point, with Grealy woefully late on a book contract, Patchett offers, "You know, pet, I could write it for you. . . . We wouldn't have to tell anyone." Who wouldn't want to be the fly on the wall at the therapy sessions where the novelist hashed out that complex symbiosis? But this memoir, dedicated to Grealy, is more love letter than autobiography. No reader will doubt the sincerity, or ferocity, of the love. Reviewed by Lisa ZeidnerCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From AudioFile
The author of BEL CANTO reads this memoir of her friendship with writer Lucy Grealy, author of AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE, which chronicled the story of her facial deformity. Patchett gives a clear and pleasant voice to the twenty-year relationship, spanning the women's days at the famed University of Iowa Writing Program, their ambitious salad days, and Patchett's struggles to support Grealy as she put herself in the hands of countless plastic surgeons who made promises they could not keep. Patchett applies a sometimes tender, sometimes whining tone to Grealy's exuberant, yet obsessive, expressions of love and neediness toward her friend. At some points, one wonders why Patchett's narration doesn't interject more emotion. But by book's end, the listener senses that Patchett has triumphed in reading this heartbreaking remembrance, which ends with Grealy's death in 2002, without allowing her voice to crack. J.J.B. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Patchett's fourth novel, Bel Canto (2001), was a resounding success, but all was not rosy. Her best friend, fellow writer Lucy Grealy, was suffering some of the worst times yet in her altogether traumatic life. Grealy died in December 2002, and Patchett now offers an electrifyingly intimate portrait of a remarkable human being, and a profoundly insightful chronicle of an incandescent friendship. Grealy wrote about her life-defining struggle with cancer of the jaw, and the cruel disfigurement left in its wake, in Autobiography of a Face (1994), a shattering memoir that transformed its scintillating and daring author into a celebrity who all too soon became a cause celebre. Patchett and Grealy's loving, complicated, and, for Patchett, extraordinarily demanding relationship began when they roomed together while attending the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Their shared passion for literature fueled their bond, and one particularly intriguing facet of this bracing remembrance is its insider perspective on the writing life. But their attraction was also one of temperamental opposites. "We were a pairing out of an Aesop's fable, the grasshopper and the ant," Patchett writes, casting herself, oh so poignantly, as the ant. 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. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


New York Times Book Review
"The juxtaposing of these very different voices makes the memoir an inspired duet...riveting."


Chicago Sun-Times
"Unforgettable...carefully rendered and breathtaking."


Joyce Carol Oates—New York Times Book Review
"An inspired duet...riveting."


Book Description

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 nonfiction, 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.


About the Author
Ann Patchett was born in Los Angeles in 1963, the youngest daughter of her nurse mother and police officer father. While attending Sarah Lawrence College, Patchett took fiction writing classes with Alan Gurganus, Russell Banks, and Grace Paley. She sold her first story to the Paris Review, where it was published before her graduation. Patchett then went on to attend the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. In 1990, Patchett won a residential fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It is there that she wrote her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, which received a James A. Michener/ Copernicus Award for a book in progress. In 1993, she received a Bunting Fellowship from the Mary Ingrahm Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. Patchett's second novel, Taft, was awarded the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best work of fiction in 1994. Her third novel, The Magician's Assistant, was short-listed for England's Orange Prize and earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994. In October of the same year, just three days after the official release of The Magician's Assistant, Patchett was awarded the Nashville Banner Tennessee Writer of the Year Award. She has also written for numerous publications, including The New York Times Magazine and Gourmet. Ann Patchett's most recent novel, Bel Canto, won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Patchett currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"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 first work of nonfiction, Ann Patchett shines a 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 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 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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Lisa Zeidner - The Washington Post

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

Janet Maslin - The New York Times

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."

Jocelyn McClurg - USA Today

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

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

The New Yorker