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Patchett writes of the twenty-year friendship that she shared with Lucy Grealy that delves into the concepts of love, sacrifice, coming of age, and the struggles with finding one’s identity. Patchett and Grealy attended Sarah Lawrence College together but did not truly know each other until they began their studies through the Iowa Writer’s workshop at the University of Iowa. This memoir touches the heart with the sheer meaning of friendship, respect and sacrifice that Ann Patchett made for Lucy Grealy.
Author of seven novels:
Nonfiction:
Patchett and business partner Karen Hayes opened Parnassus Books in November of 2011, in Nashville Tennessee
“She was a spectacular person, brilliant and difficult, demanding and talented. She was
capable of great love and tenderness, as well as great suffering. She was my best friend
for 17 years. After her death, at the age of 39, I wrote a book about us. I wrote it as a
way to memorialize her and mourn her, and as a way of keeping her own important
memoir, Autobiography of a Face, alive, even as I had not been able to keep her alive.
This was a story of a Herculean effort to endure hardship, and to be a friend. Even when
the details of our lives became sordid, it was not the stuff of sewers.”
-Ann Patchett writing of Lucy Grealy in
“The Love Between the Two Women is Not Normal” Published in The Atlantic
A response to the negative reaction from readers.
Further Analysis: Truth and Beauty
Born December 2, 1963 in Los Angeles California
Her family moved to Tennessee when she was 6 years old.
The love and passion in a friendship is what makes this story truly remarkable. Patchett uses vivid description and sensory detail in order to bring the reader into each scene and provides enough background and summary to se the tone encouraging the reader to always want more, to learn of what happens next to the friendship, to Lucy, and to Ann who so devotedly is always there. The tone of the memoir is very nostalgic and as told from Ann's point of view it is very intriguing to see the analysis of Lucy's life. It is as if Ann steps into Lucy's shoes in order to show the reader feeling and emotion.
Quotes from Truth and Beauty:
“Lucy had a genius for friendship. She was able to offer up the deepest part of herself over and over again to people she liked, and in return, we were willing to do anything for her. That was her gift: herself, her intimacy.”
(June 3, 1963- December 18, 2002)
Had lost part of her jaw to cancer at the age of nine and endured 38 reconstructive surgeries over the course of her lifetime.
Wrote Autobiography of a Face (1994)
Cause of her death was reported as undetermined but her friends knew she had been suffering from treatments.
“Dearest anvil,” she would write to me six years later, “dearest deposed president of some now defunct but lovingly remembered country, dearest to me, I can find no suitable words of affection for you, words that will contain the whole of your wonderfulness to me. You will have to make due with being my favorite bagel, my favorite blue awning above some great little café where the coffee is strong but milky and had real texture to it.” (Truth and Beauty, 7)
"About." ANN PATCHETT. Parnassus Books, Nashville, n.d. Web. 05 Dec. 2016.
<http://www.annpatchett.com/about/>.
"Ann Patchett." Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Encyclopedia Britannica, 15 Sept.
2016. Web. 08 Dec. 2016. <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ann-Patchett>.
Hoby, Hermione. "Ann Patchett: 'If Writers Are to Survive We Must Take Responsibility
for Ourselves and Our Industry'" A Life in ... Guardian News and Media, 03 Sept. 2016. Web. 05 Dec. 2016.
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/03/ann-patchett-interview-commonwealth>.
Patchett, Ann. "“The Love Between the Two Women Is Not Normal”." The Atlantic.
Atlantic Media Company, 2007. Web. 08 Dec. 2016.
<http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/08/-the-love-between-the-two-women-is-not-normal/306038/>.
Truth and Beauty is a powerful story of the struggle in this world and that of love, even when unconditional not always being able to save someone. Patchett tares at the heart-strings in a way that forces social question and understanding of beauty, of growing up and the real meaning of truth.