More Ann Patchett: Truth and Beauty

Though I finished Truth and Beauty just today, and there's a whole stack of finished books with prior claims to their place in the book draft, I decided to put it here as a follow-up to Taft, by the same author. Truth and Beauty is not a novel. It's an autobiographical account of the author's friendship with poet and memoirist Lucy Grealy. I picked it up for a dollar at a book sale, simply because I recognized the author's name. I wasn't sure I was going to like it much. I mean, the premise sounds a little grim: the author's extremely deep and intimate but heterosexual friendship with someone whose face and life are half destroyed by cancer, and who ends up dead of a heroin overdose.

To sum it up that way, though, is to be unfair to both the book's author and its subject. Lucy is brave and scintillating and impossible. Ann is patient and firm and full of wonder. The milieu in which they live, as creative writers who first struggle and then succeed, has its own measure of fascination. The whole thing in a way is an updated Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but without the ventriloquism. What leaves the most lasting impression in my mind, though, is the nuances of feeling in Ann's portrait of Lucy. She is far more generous to her subject than I could imagine being, though she doesn't omit the unbearable aspects of her beloved friend. She poured a tremendous amount of emotional energy into her friendship with Lucy, but she is also able to convey the ways she found it rewarding. Near the end, Lucy claims (pleasantly, without accusation) that Ann has done so much for Lucy because Ann wants to be the saint. By then, the reader is able to feel as deeply stung as Ann at the injustice of that analysis.

By the end of the book, I came away with the feeling that Lucy taught Ann a great deal about love. It was Lucy who was obsessed with love; from start to finish she could inspire it in practically anyone but could never understand or appreciate it. She always thought she was unhappy because "no one loved her" but in fact she was unhappy because she loved no one, not really; she didn't understand how. But Ann never says that outright. She hints it in a thousand ways but she never admits it in black and white. That's because Ann does know how to love and she loved her friend Lucy enough to give her the truest and most beautiful memorial she possibly could.