Truth & Beauty : A Friendship
Author(s): Ann Patchett
"A loving testament to the work and reward of the best friendships, the kind where your arms can’t distinguish burden from embrace.” — People
New York Times Bestselling author Ann Patchett’s first work of nonfiction chronicling her decades-long friendship with the critically acclaimed and recently deceased author, Lucy Grealy.
Ann Patchett and the late 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 Gealy's critically acclaimed and hugely successful memoir, Autobiography of a Face, she wrote about losing part of her jaw to childhood cancer, years of chemotherapy and radiation, and 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 together. 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 is what it means to be part of two lives that are intertwined...and what happens when one is left behind.
This is a tender, brutal book about loving the person we cannot save. It is about loyalty and being uplifted by the sheer effervescence of someone who knew how to live life to the fullest.
Review(s):
“More than truth or beauty, it is love”
“This is a loving testament to the work and reward of the best friendships, the kind where your arms can’t distinguish burden from embrace.”
“Unforgettable...carefully rendered and breathtaking.”
“An inspired duet...riveting.”
“A work every bit as entrancing, daring and smart as her fiction—channels her grief.[into] an electrifying portrait of Grealy, a bravura self-portrait and a stunning and insightful interpretation of an epic friendship...A generous and virtuoso performance.”
“This frank, perceptive book can be read in many ways, not only as a story of friendship but also as a young artist’s eye-opening introduction to the wider world.”
“If this honest book sends new readers out in search of Grealy’s memoir, Patchett will have served her friend’s memory well.”
“In her first nonfiction, novelist Patchett paints a deeply moving portrait of friendship between two talented writers, illuminating the bond between herself and poet Lucy Grealy...a tough and loving tribute, hard to put down, impossible to forget.”
“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.”
“[Truth & Beauty] shares many insights into the nature of devotion...This gorgeously written chronicle unfolds as an example of how friendships can contain more passion and affection than any in the romantic realm.”
ISBN: 9780060572150