Truth and Beauty

Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


"Ann Prachett and the late Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and, after enrolling in the Iowa Writers' Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work. In Grealy's critically acclaimed memoir, Autobiography of a Face, she wrote about losing part of her jaw to childhood cancer, years of chemotherapy and radiation, and endless reconstructive surgeries. In Truth & Beauty, the story isn't Lucy's life or Ann's life, but the parts of their lives they shared. This is a portrait of unwavering commitment that spans twenty years, from the long 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 ... and what happens when one is left behind.

"This is a tender, brutal book about loving the person we cannot save. It is about loyalty, and being lifted up by the sheer effervescence of someone who knew how to live life to the fullest."
~~front flap

I don't really know how to talk about this book. It was unsettling, disquieting. In this day and age, of life lived too fast, with too much to do and not enough hours or days, we've become ruthless about friendship. A friend with too many problems, with unresolved emotional issues -- someone needy, clinging, possessive? Ah no. It's too much -- we haven't the time, the emotional resources ourselves to withstand the depth and scope of the cataclysm. It's too demanding, too much work, too much trouble. We cut those sorts of people out of our lives, remove them with surgical precision and congratulate ourselves for facing reality without flinching.

The book is also comforting, heartening, enlightening. The author never considered her friend a liability, a disaster, someone to be jettisoned in order to survive herself. She loved her friend with that unwavering commitment we all search for in a friend or lover, and so seldom find. Unconditional love, that's the phrase I'm hunting for. No matter how outrageous, how demanding, how inconvenient, the author loved her friend.

As I read the book, as Lucy's actions and emotions became more and more bizarre, more demanding, more outre, I found myself thinking that I couldn't have been the friend that Ann was. I doubt I could have remained her friend through the drug use, the medical emergencies and all the other crises and catastrophes that Lucy sought to give her life the frisson she so desperately craved. And yet, this book delineated a beautiful love that we all would wish for ourselves: unconditional love.

Sometimes in this world, we have to look at relationships with eyes wide open, have to tally up the cost benefit analysis, and generally find the relationship not worth the cost. But equally, sometimes we have to immerse ourselves in a relationship for the sheer joy of it, for the love of the other person, for the comfort of our soul. This book is about choosing the latter path, and the joys and sorrows that came of that choice.