SPOILER ALERT!

So this is really more like a 2.5 star read, but interesting in a train-wreck kind of way. This is the true story of Patchett's friendship and fascination with fellow author Lucy Grealy from college through Grealy's suicide in her late 30s. Grealy suffered from Ewing's sarcoma which claimed a part of her face in childhood and then she permitted it to take her self-respect and the rest of her life. Grealy told her own story in "Autobiography of a Face", and the story should have probably ended there, but Patchett decided the story was hers as well and essentially sold out her friend after her death. Grealy is pitiful and self-pitying, I found it nearly impossible to like her and even more difficult to respect her struggle. She used her face as an excuse for damned near everything from laziness to promiscuity to drug addiction. I am unsure why Patchett felt compelled to write this book, perhaps as a cleansing of sorts...hard to say, but it has dark and darker parts, nothing she describes sounds like real friendship and it all reads like a sad, stunted love affair, or a relationship between a caretaker and her ward. Ann conveys nothing about Lucy that makes me understand her weird attraction to her and Lucy offers little in the way of warmth or giving always taking with both hands to fill some bottomless pit of need. But if that's how she was, well, then, that IS the story I suppose.

This book is primarily a biography of the author’s friend and fellow writer, Lucy Grealy. Patchett and Grealy were roommates when they attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1985. Grealy had lost part of her jaw during cancer treatment in her childhood, which greatly impacted her self-image. The book covers their friendship, relationships, and writing careers, spanning almost two decades. It may have helped if I had known of Lucy Grealy beforehand. She comes across as a person with many psychological issues, and there is a lot of depressing content in this book. I think I will stick with Patchett’s fiction in the future.

This is a beautiful, heart-wrenching memoir about friendship--would highly, highly recommend the audiobook, which is narrated by Ann Patchett.

At the beginning of this book, I was captivated with their friendship and their love of writing and belief that writing would save them. At the end, I didn't even know what to think.

About midway through this book, Patchett recounts the story of a time that both she and Lucy did readings at a bookstore, and an attendee asked Lucy how she recalled the conversations so precisely. Annoyed, Lucy snaps that she didn't, that she was telling a story.

This story, about Lucy's life as Ann experienced it, must, I think, be taken the same way. And wow, what a story. I see that there is controversy over what Lucy's family thought she would have wanted, and whether this exploration of the extreme darkness Lucy lived with should have been told by someone other than Lucy.

But that would've robbed me of such a beautiful ode to a dear but troubled friend--someone I had literally never heard of, not even the title of her book, even once, before I started this book. (And I have heard of a LOT of books!) I reminded myself that though this book seems like it is about Lucy, it is really about Ann, and that's the story that I wanted to hear.

My best friend Audrey gave me this book at the same time she gave me the book "Autobiography of a face". What a great present. I would read them in the order they are written (autobiography) first. The first book is just an interesting story which is well written. I really liked this book b/c it was mostly about the power of friendship. We all know the power of a good relationship with a significant other but rarely is the power of a female friendship written about. I can relate to this book (in some ways) in regards to the girlfriend that gave me the books. We have been through many different periods in our lives together, I've been sad, she's been sad and hopefully we have helped each other out during those times even those we have mostly lived miles apart.

I shelved this book so long before I read it that, when I got around to checking it out from the library, I had forgotten what it was about. I even forgot that it was a memoir-- I thought for the first half that it was fiction! I think that was a really happy accident, ultimately. Reading the first half as fiction, I fell in love with Ann's mind-- a mind I thought could invent the inimitable Lucy Grealy. That's how Ann won me over.
When I finally realized it was truth (and not just beauty!), I found myself becoming increasingly grateful.... Truth is stranger than fiction, and, in some twisted way, Lucy's decline and death are made more beautiful (and true) by being reality, not fiction.
What a lovely friendship, and an even lovelier memoir of a friendship.

A beautiful love story of the friendship and love between Ann and her best friend Lucy. It is also a story of what the human spirit can and cannot endure - in terms everything Lucy Grealy endured.

I always read this one right after Lucy Grealy's Autobiography as a Face. This time around I was struck by how Patchett just cannot understand Grealy's loneliness even though she is wildly popular and deeply loved by her friends. It's as though Patchett believes if she loved Grealy hard enough that love could have fixed everything. A beautiful and heartbreaking story.

It’s an interesting title, isn’t it? She never fully or even partially explains it. And the paperback cover, too, is beautiful and cryptic with detailed and delicate bug life.


I read this nonfiction book only because Patchett discussed it in This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, the real book I meant to read. In that one, Patchett tells a pretty interesting story about her earlier memoir, in which a small private college chose it as a book to be read by all incoming freshman—and the book was met by unanticipated outrage over its morality. Patchett wrote an impassioned essay on the horrors of book-banning—with which I agreed—but I did kinda want to know what the fuss was all about.


So, basically, Ann Patchett was super close friends with Lucy Grealy, who had cancer as a child, which left her jaw forever disfigured. Lucy had thirty-eight reconstructive surgeries in her short life. She felt ugly almost all the time. Loneliness plagued her. She used sex to get love. Lots of sex to get minimal love. Extremely needy and not very responsible, she unintentionally used her friends who were terribly faithful to her. She ended up a heroin addict, and died at thirty-nine of an accidental overdose. Lucy wrote the very successful Autobiography of a Face in 1994. As a writer, she was respected and loved.


Those are the details. While I wouldn’t have chosen it as the one book that all incoming Freshmen of some college should read, I cannot—for the life of me—see how this book would be the cause of vehement moral outrage. (There is an abortion in it that is undertaken in a cavalier way, but surely a reader can handle this and think deeply about the plight of this woman.) She was a desperately miserable human being who wanted to be loved in an impossible way. (“But Lucy had been alone too much of her life, and in her loneliness she had constructed a vision of what a perfect relationship would look like.”) She wanted to be beautiful. She wanted someone to find her extraordinarily beautiful. As Patchett writes, “The question was never whether or not Lucy wanted the man, the question was only whether or not the man wanted her. It was her truest hope that everybody wanted her.”


But here’s why this book is, like the other stuff I’ve read by this author, an excellent read: Patchett’s writing is a little hypnotic. I trust her voice. And for all of the focus on Grealy, Patchett’s offering of friendship is remarkable. Grealy takes more than she gives. Patchett was clearly the one who picked Grealy up off the ground, caring for her, cleaning her, feeding her, paying her bills, flying to her bedside, sending her to rehab. I think Patchett—without sounding self-congratulatory in the least bit—defies many presumptions about friendship. And this lack of self-congratulation is definitely standout.


Grealy’s sister doesn’t like Patchett’s portrayal of Lucy. I’m not sure why. Was Lucy less promiscuous? Not as desperate? Not so sad? It is true that Patchett gets to be the one who paints the picture. While there is some mention of monetary support, however, I spent a bit of time wondering where this family was during the surgeries. Why was Grealy forever reliant on Ann Patchett and other friends? Where were her family members when this poor woman was attaching parts of her leg to her face? To be honest, they seemed a little absent. Kinda conspicuously absent.


I love when Patchett talks about writing. When she does so, I agree with her always. Grealy was a writer, too, and this was an inescapable part of her story. Patchett says, “Had we managed to keep our lives focused on art, I think we would have lived in a state of brilliant happiness, but no one can stand in front of a painting forever.”


Is this where the beauty part of the title comes from? The focus on Art is about the pursuit of beauty, but we inevitably turn from Art, subject to the demands of our own humanity?


But back to writing. Patchett’s writerly life—from my perspective—looks a little charmed. From an early age, it sounds like she moved from grant to fellowship, from great publishing deal to picturesque residency. I’ve been scolded for my jealousy. I’ll take the scolding, but I love some of her talk about what it’s like to be a writer. She tells of the time that she saw the movie Glengarry Glen Ross with Lucy. For them, the film is like Nightmare on Elm Street. They hold hands, nervous wrecks over the plight of these working stiffs, these unhappy men in jobs. After the movie, Lucy responds, “My God . . . What if we weren’t writers? What if we had to work like that?” Ann says, “I wouldn’t make it.”


Yes, that movie is maybe a lot for anyone, but I think Patchett kinda nails this writer-thing. I have to admit to experiencing that terror over the thought of needing to make a living in someway apart from writing or talking about writing. I’ve gotten pretty lucky in some ways, but the free money for writers has eluded me. Completely.


Still, Lucy lived and breathed as a writer, and Patchett draws that out.


How, then, was Lucy particularly a writer suffering? How did her disfigurement affect her vocation? What is truth and beauty in this context?


The book was written pretty quickly. I think, in all honesty, this wasn’t so hot. Patchett seems like a fast writer (I’m jealous of this too), but I think this would’ve been a better book had it marinated or stewed a little, and not been written so close to Grealy’s death. It’s still good, but there are things present in here that Patchett grazes lightly upon. There could be more made about Lucy’s identity as a writer, and how that uniquely affected her sense of beauty. Patchett might be more explicit about both truth and beauty. We see their friendship, and it’s beauty well, though.


That college thing was silly.

Another brilliant story of love and friendship from Ann.

this book gave me a whole new appreciation for my friends