“More than truth or beauty, it is love” — San Francisco Chronicle
“This is a loving testament to the work and reward of the best friendships, the kind where your arms can’t distinguish burden from embrace.” — People
“Unforgettable...carefully rendered and breathtaking.” — Chicago Sun-Times
“An inspired duet...riveting.” — New York Times Book Review
“A work every bit as entrancing, daring and smart as her fiction—channels her grief.[into] an electrifying portrait of Grealy, a bravura self-portrait and a stunning and insightful interpretation of an epic friendship...A generous and virtuoso performance.” — Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“This frank, perceptive book can be read in many ways, not only as a story of friendship but also as a young artist’s eye-opening introduction to the wider world.” — New York Times
“If this honest book sends new readers out in search of Grealy’s memoir, Patchett will have served her friend’s memory well.” — USA Today
“In her first nonfiction, novelist Patchett paints a deeply moving portrait of friendship between two talented writers, illuminating the bond between herself and poet Lucy Grealy...a tough and loving tribute, hard to put down, impossible to forget.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Dazzling in its psychological interpretations, piquant in its wit, candid in its self-portraiture, and gracefully balanced between emotion and reason, this is an utterly involving and cathartic elegy that speaks to everyone who would do anything for their soul mate.” — Booklist (starred review)
“[Truth & Beauty] shares many insights into the nature of devotion...This gorgeously written chronicle unfolds as an example of how friendships can contain more passion and affection than any in the romantic realm.” — Publishers Weekly
“...lyrical, lovely...Patchett has preserved her friend’s talent in this book, and provided more evidence of her own.” — BookPage
“{a} loving, clear-sighted portrayal..” — Elle
“A contemporary story of friendship and the writing life at once intense, honest, and heartbreaking. Highly recommended.” — Library Journal (starred review)
“An exquisite account of the close yet painful friendship...This is an intimate look into the lives of two successful writers, and the psychological demands of an extremely close friendship that ultimately ends in tragedy.” — Chicago Tribune
“Patchett’s is a book with a vortex at the center, and it’s magnetic.” — Boston Globe
“The reader mourns not only the loss of Lucy but the loss one feels when the pages of an enthralling book begin to thin and, as if suddenly, there is no more to read.” — Wall Street Journal
“...a moving companion to Grealy’s [Autobiography of a Face].” — The New Yorker
Ann Patchett 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.
About the Author
Ann Patchett is the author of novels, most recently the #1 New York Times bestselling Tom Lake, works of nonfiction, and children's books. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner, the Women's Prize for Fiction in the UK, and the Book Sense Book of the Year. Her novel The Dutch House was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and Time magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. President Biden awarded her the National Humanities Medal in recognition of her contributions to American culture. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she is the owner of Parnassus Books.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Truth & Beauty
A FriendshipBy Patchett, AnnPerennial
ISBN: 0060572159
Chapter One
The thing you can count on in life is that Tennessee will always be scorching hot in August. In 1985 you could also pretty much count on the fact that the U-Haul truck you rented to drive from Tennessee to Iowa, cutting up through Missouri, would have no air-conditioning or that the air-conditioning would be broken. These are the things I knew for sure when I left home to start graduate school. The windows were down in the truck and my stepsister, Tina, was driving. We sat on towels to keep our bare legs from adhering to the black vinyl seats and licked melted M&Ms off our fingers. My feet were on the dashboard and we were singing because the radio had gone the way of the air conditioner. "Going to the chapel and we're -- gonna get mar-ar-aried." We knew all the words to that one. Tina had the better voice, one more reason I was grateful she had agreed to come along for the ride. I was twenty-one and on my way to be a fiction writer. The whole prospect seemed as simple as that: rent a truck, take a few leftover pots and pans and a single bed mattress from the basement of my mother's house, pack up my typewriter. The hills of the Tennessee Valley flattened out before we got to Memphis and as we headed north the landscape covered over with corn. The blue sky blanched white in the heat. I leaned out the window and thought, Good, no distractions.
I had been to Iowa City once before in June to find a place to live. I was looking for two apartments then, one for myself and one for Lucy Grealy, who I had gone to college with. I got a note from Lucy not long after receiving my acceptance letter from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She said that initially when she heard I had gotten into the workshop she was sorry, because she had wanted to be the only student there from Sarah Lawrence. But then our mutual friend Jono Wilks had told her that I was going up early to find housing and if this was the case, would I find a place for her as well? She couldn't afford to make the trip to look herself and so it went without saying that she was on a very tight budget. I sat at the kitchen table and looked at her handwriting, which seemed oddly scrawny and uncertain, like a note on a birthday card from an elderly aunt. I had never seen her writing before, and certainly these were the only words she had ever addressed to me. While Lucy and I would later revise our personal history to say we had been friends since we met as freshmen, just for the pleasure of adding a few more years to the tally, the truth was we did not know each other at all in college. Or the truth was that I knew her and she did not know me. Even at Sarah Lawrence, a school full of models and actresses and millionaire daughters of industry, everyone knew Lucy and everyone knew her story: she had had a Ewing's sarcoma at the age of nine, had lived through five years of the most brutal radiation and chemotherapy, and then undergone a series of reconstructive surgeries that were largely unsuccessful. The drama of her life, combined with her reputation for being the smartest student in all of her classes, made her the campus mascot, the favorite pet in her dirty jeans and oversized Irish sweaters. She kept her head tipped down so that her long dark blond hair fell over her face to hide the fact that part of her lower jaw was missing. From a distance you would have thought she had lost something, money or keys, and that she was vigilantly searching the ground trying to find it.
It was Lucy's work-study job to run the film series on Friday and Saturday nights, and before she would turn the projector on, it was up to her to walk in front of the screen and explain that in accordance with the New York State Fire Marshal, exits were located at either side of the theater. Only she couldn't say it, because the crowd of students cheered her so wildly, screaming and applauding and chanting her name, "LOO-cee, LOO-cee, LOO-cee!" She would wrap her arms around her head and twist from side to side, mortified, loving it. Her little body, the body of an underfed eleven-year-old, was visibly shaking inside her giant sweaters. Finally her embarrassment reached such proportions that the audience recognized it and settled down. She had to speak her lines. "In accordance with the New York State Fire Marshal," she would begin. She was shouting, but her voice was smaller than the tiny frame it came from. It was no more than a whisper once it passed the third row.
I watched this show almost every weekend. It was as great a part of the evening's entertainment as seeing Jules et Jim. Being shy myself, I did not come to shout her name until our junior year. By then she would wave to the audience as they screamed for her. She would bow from the waist. She had cut off her hair so that it was now something floppy and boyish, a large cowlick sweeping up from her pale forehead. We could see her face clearly. It was always changing, swollen after a surgery or sinking in on itself after a surgery had failed. One year she walked with a cane and someone told me it was because they had taken a chunk of her hip to grind up and graft into her jaw.
We knew things about Lucy the way one knows things about the private lives of movie stars, by a kind of osmosis of information ...
Continues...
Excerpted from Truth & Beautyby Patchett, Ann Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. 
![Autobiography of a Face [Thirtieth Anniversary Edition]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81yK7U+cZSL._AC_UL165_SR165,165_.jpg)
