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Search - Truth & Beauty: A Friendship
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Truth & Beauty: A Friendship Author: |
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Book Information
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Other Versions of this Book: Hardcover, Audio Cassette (Unabridged), Audio CD (Unabridged), Hardcover
Book Description:
The author of Bel Canto -- winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Orange Prize and long-running New York Times bestseller -- turns to nonfiction in a moving chronicle of her decades-long friendship with the critically acclaimed and recently deceased author, Lucy Grealy.
What happens when the person who is your family is someone you aren't bound to by blood? What happens when that person is not your lover, but your best friend? In her frank and startlingly intimate first work of nonfiction, Truth & Beauty, Ann Patchett shines light on the little-explored 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 Writer's Workshop began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work. In her critically acclaimed memoir, Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy wrote about the first half of her life. 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 20 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.
This is a tender, brutal book about loving the 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.
What happens when the person who is your family is someone you aren't bound to by blood? What happens when that person is not your lover, but your best friend? In her frank and startlingly intimate first work of nonfiction, Truth & Beauty, Ann Patchett shines light on the little-explored 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 Writer's Workshop began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work. In her critically acclaimed memoir, Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy wrote about the first half of her life. 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 20 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.
This is a tender, brutal book about loving the 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.
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Top Member Book Reviews
3 member(s) found this review helpful.
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.
3 member(s) found this review helpful.
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.
2 member(s) found this review helpful.
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.
2 member(s) found this review helpful.
Facinating book. I recommend reading "Autobiography of a Face" first and then this book. Both are compelling and moving books.
2 member(s) found this review helpful.
Wow- it made me laugh, made me cry and i read the entire book in one night--AWESOME
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
A fantastic companion to Autobiography of a Face-Lucy Grealy. This book was written by Lucy's dear friend.
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
This is a non-fiction book by Ann Pachett who has written wonderful books. Although good I prefer the fiction books.
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
Enjoyable book details the friendship between the author and poet Lucy.
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
Really good book about friendship.
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
Excellent book, very different in style from the author's fiction.
Please Rate these Book Reviews
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.
May be I am a very practicle person to have a long friendship like this one where one person is so dependent on another and yet the friendship coninues for years. I just had a hard time understanding why the friendship continues after so many mentions of what sound like complains about organizational skills and decipline of Author's friend.
If I did have a friendship like this, I would have had a very hard time writing in such great details the flaws of my best friend.
Even though the book is a great read, and made me think a lot about my friendships, I always felt like I was incapable of fully comprehending this friendship. I would recommend it to any woman with a circle of friends around her.
OK but not spectacular. More than anything, I wanted to see what Lucy Grealy looked like after reading the book.
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