Search - Truth & Beauty: A Friendship

Lots of controversy over this mrmoir. Lucy's family says things didn't happen exactly as Ann Patchett says they did. Interesting discussion at book club, however.

Patchett writes so beautifully that somehow it doesn't matter that this memoir of her friendship with writer and cancer survivor, Lucy Grealy, is often depressing and frustrating when Lucy's neediness and overwhelming insecurity dictates both their lives; however the love the two women have for each other shines thru all the heartache.

This was o.k., interesting, funny at times, but not really what I expected. I kept waiting for it to get a little better. It seemed ver much like the friendship between the two writers was one-sided, with Lucy being completely selfish and self-absorbed, and Ann having a saintly patience. I didn't really like Patchett's Bel Canto, so perhaps it as just her prose style that left me wanting.

Fscinating relationship and very well told

A riveting story of friendship, what it means to be an author, and living a passionate life. It is all the more valid because it is based in reality, very frank and insightful.

I struggled to finish this. Yes, there were some amusing parts and some sad parts. I just kept wondering why the author would continue a twenty year friendship with someone so seemingly narcissistic and selfish. There were parts that seemed to me like jealous rantings of someone who spent half of her life living in the shadow of another. The part where her mother recommended that she save all of her letters from Lucy foreshadowed what was to become what I feel to be the intent of commercial success at the cost of another's privacy. Lots of dirty things revealed about a woman who is deceased and unable to refute or celebrate it. I just found the whole thing shameful and am upset at our bookclub member who picked this book (in conjunction with Autobiography of a Face) for this month's discussion.