Ann Patchett and the late 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 Grealy's critically acclaimed memior, 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.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

What happens when the person who is your family is someone you aren't bound to by blood? What happens when the person you promise to love and to honor for the rest of your life is not your lover, but your best friend? In Truth & Beauty, her frank and startlingly intimate first work of nonfiction, Ann Patchett shines a fresh, revealing light on the 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 Writers' Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work was. In her critically acclaimed and hugely successful memoir, Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy wrote about losing part of her jaw to childhood cancer, the years of chemotherapy and radiation, and then the 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, cold winters of the Midwest, to surgical wards, to book parties in New York. Through love, fame, drugs, and despair, this book shows us what it means to be part of two lives that are intertwined.

This is a tender, brutal book about loving a 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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Lisa Zeidner - The Washington Post

… this memoir, dedicated to Grealy, is more love letter than autobiography. No reader will doubt the sincerity, or ferocity, of the love.

Janet Maslin - The New York Times

The beauty of this book is in the details, and in the anecdotes so colorfully recalled. There is Lucy's blind date with George Stephanopoulos, who answered her personal ad in The New York Review of Books. There is the time the two aspiring authors watched "Glengarry Glen Ross" in horror, wondering what life would be like if they held David Mamet-style jobs. And there is the way Ms. Grealy could move down the street, "everyone waving as if she were gliding past on a rose-covered float." The drive-in bank teller would say hello. Ms. Grealy, however much she loved attention, sighed and told Ms. Patchett: "That's not even my bank."

Jocelyn McClurg - USA Today

Truth & Beauty (the title comes from a chapter in Grealy's Autobiography) is heartbreaking, funny, disturbing, at times infuriating żżż just like the odd but endearing Lucy.

The New York Times Book Review

Truth & Beauty is a harrowing document, composed in a spare, forthright style very different from the elegant artifice of Patchett's best-known novels...It can be no surprise that the memoir of a friendship that ends in the premature death of a gifted writer does not make for cheerful reading. And yet there is much in Truth & Beauty that is uplifting, a testament to the perennial idealism and optimism of the young.—Joyce Carol Oates

The New Yorker

Lucy Grealy attained prominence, in 1994, with “Autobiography of a Face,” a restrained account of acute disfigurement and continual surgery after a childhood tumor required the removal of much of her lower jaw. Grealy died of a heroin overdose in 2002, at the age of thirty-nine, and Patchett’s memoir of her friend, whom she first met in college, reveals a level of anguish that was submerged in Grealy’s book. Patchett sees herself as the hardworking ant to Lucy’s glamorous grasshopper, with her life in New York, countless friends, and a habit of finishing work at the last minute. But Grealy’s tremendous gift for friendship signalled a deep neediness and an inability to be alone that also made it difficult for her to sit down and write. If Patchett’s book doesn’t quite stand on its own, it is a moving companion to Grealy’s.Read all 9 "From The Critics" >