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Analysis of Truth and Beauty:

Awards For Ann Patchett:

Truth and Beauty was Patchett’s first full-length volume of nonfiction.

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.

  • England’s Orange Prize
  • The PEN/Faulkner Award
  • The Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
  • The Book Sense Book of the Year
  • A Guggenheim Fellowship
  • The Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize
  • The Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts
  • The American Bookseller’s Association’s Most Engaging Author Award
  • The Women’s National Book Association’s Award

Ann Patchett Education

Patchett Works

  • Attended St. Bernard Academy in Nashville, Tennessee (A Catholic School for Girls)
  • B.A. Sarah Lawrence College (1984)
  • M.F.A. Iowa Writer’s Workshop, University of Iowa (1987)
  • Fine Arts Work Center: Provincetown, Massachusetts

Parnassus Books

Author of seven novels:

  • The Patron Saint of Liars (1992)
  • Taft (1994)
  • The Magician’s Assistant (1997)
  • Bel Canto (2001)
  • Run (2007)
  • State of Wonder (2011)
  • Commonwealth (2016)

Nonfiction:

  • Truth and Beauty (2004)
  • What Now? (2008)
  • This is the Story of a Happy Marriage (2013)

Patchett and business partner Karen Hayes opened Parnassus Books in November of 2011, in Nashville Tennessee

  • Becoming an active spokeswoman for independent book sellers
  • Was an honorary chair of World Book Night
  • 2012- Time Magazine named her as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World

“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.

Ann Patchett

Further Analysis: Truth and Beauty

Born December 2, 1963 in Los Angeles California

Her family moved to Tennessee when she was 6 years old.

“Here at Parnassus — and at bookstores all across the country — we are offering shelter from the storm. Not only do we promise a culture of intellectual freedom and intellectual expansion, we promise dogs who love without judgement.

Love without judgement, people. Try topping that.”

-Ann Patchett

“One of the things I’m obsessed with in all my books is time,

and I felt that time in my work was contracting”

-Ann Patchett,

Interview with The Slate Book Review

“If writers are to survive we must take responsibility for ourselves and our industry”

–Ann Patchett

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:

Lucinda Margaret Grealy

“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)

Citations

Truth and Beauty-Ann Patchett

"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.

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