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TRUTH & BEAUTY by Ann Patchett

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Lucy Grealy was an author and poet and a dear friend of Ann Patchett’s, ever since they were roommates at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.  This homage to Lucy and to her friendship with Patchett is very readable but not quite riveting.  Lucy was a very needy person who just wanted to be loved, preferably by a man, despite the fact that she had tons of very devoted friends—both male and female.  As a child she developed cancer of the jaw, and her life was an endless series of surgeries intended to improve her appearance and her ability to eat and speak.  She achieved acclaim as a writer when she published Autobiography of a Face in 1994, but no surgeon was able to reconstruct her face satisfactorily.  She suffered mightily, even having her fibula removed so that it could be used to supplant her jaw bone, but the results were never as advertised.  My only complaint about this book is that Patchett never gave me reason to love Lucy, who reminds me so much of the character Jude in A Little Life.  I empathized with Lucy, but she squandered not only her friendships but also her talent and her financial gains.  Devotees like Patchett were constantly at her beck and call—financially, emotionally, and in person.  I just couldn’t figure out why, unless all her friends needed to be needed, and I don’t think that’s the case with Ann Patchett, at least.  Ann obviously genuinely loved Lucy, partly for her mind, I suppose.  One very telling incident in the book is where Lucy went on a date with George Stephanopoulos after he answered her personal ad in the New York Review of Books.  She did not seem disappointed at their failure to hit it off, but the question on all her friends’ minds was whether he knew in advance about her disfigured face.  She unraveled when someone actually asked her.




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TRUTH & BEAUTY by Ann Patchett

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