Truth and Beauty: A Friendship. By Ann Patchett. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 2004. 257 pages. $23.95.

The week before Christmas of 2002, the writer Lucy Grealy died at 39. Ann Patchett--author of the bestseller Bel Canto--was working on a fifth novel; but, in her grief, she put the manuscript aside to write Truth and Beauty, her first book of nonfiction and the record of a rare friendship. The closing chapters are dark with disaster. Patchett's beloved editor, Robert Jones, dies of cancer; she runs, confused, as the World Trade Center's twin towers burn and fall; Grealy develops a heroin habit and dies from an accidental overdose. Survivor of 38 operations and at least a few suicide attempts, Lucy looked fragile, even childlike; but she was tough. She seemed certain to outlive her many friends.

Bodies fail in Truth and Beauty; yet--through Patchett's artful narrative--love, truth, and beauty endure, just as Shakespeare and Keats promised. As graduate instructors at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the mid-1980s, Patchett and Grealy were so ill-prepared for their teaching duties that "at the time it seemed it would have been more provident to send us into the fields to husk corn as a means of reducing our in-state rates" (17). A product of 12 years of Catholic schooling in Nashville, Patchett meticulously planned each class. Grealy winged it. She "could talk on the nature of truth and beauty for hours, and after all, what novel or poem or play in an Introduction to Literature class couldn't benefit from a truth-and-beauty discussion?" (18).

In fact, "Truth and Beauty" is the title of a chapter in Grealy's 1994 Autobiography of a Face, a book that quickly brought her media attention. Interviewers were fascinated by Lucy's childhood battle with Ewing's sarcoma and her endless operations to offset the cancer's damage: "One day she could be discussing the survival of tragedy with Oprah and the next it was America's obsession with beauty on CNN" (135).

Grealy loved the attention, just as she had loved her adoring circle of friends at Sarah Lawrence College. Mocked in grade school and stared at in high school, the young Lucy hid her disfigured face with long hair. Sarah Lawrence, famous for its writing workshops, was the first place she found a community of fellow-outsiders. She planned to become a medical doctor--doctors had been a major source of comfort for her; but during her freshman year she distinguished herself as a poet. Rejecting conventional images of beauty, she cultivated the "I-don't-care-I'm-an-artist look" and "the fashion of cool." Patchett remarks that poetry both "defined" Lucy and "saved her" (36).

Like everyone else at Sarah Lawrence, Ann knew who Lucy was, but their friendship began in Iowa, where they shared their lives in a dingy green duplex. A buoyant Lucy walked through the doorway after Patchett's hot drive from her Nashville home, leaping into her arms and squeezing Ann's waist with thin legs: more of "a claim" than "a greeting" (6). Ann became the reliable ant to Lucy's impetuous grasshopper, the tortoise to Lucy's hare. Interestingly, Patchett revises these Aesopian fables to tell a story of interdependence: "Grasshoppers and hares find the ants and tortoises. They need us to survive, but we need them as well" (20).

Writing was always a strong bond between Patchett and Grealy, who applied for (and won) many of the same fellowships and literary residencies, but in noncompeting categories. For several years, their writing, like their friendship, "was the only thing that was interesting about our otherwise very dull lives. We were better off when we were together" (73). One especially happy scene is the description of a joint reading for Lucy's Autobiography of a Face and Ann's novel Taft. Both women's faces appeared on bookmarks printed for the event, and they laughed as they crouched between bookshelves, waiting to make their grand entrance.

Fame was exhilarating enough to lift Grealy, at least temporarily, from her frequent depressions. Her emotional suffering could be as wrenching as her periods of intense physical pain. Fearful that no man would ever truly love her, she was sometimes reckless in her sexual relationships; she needed constant reassurance from her friends and was jealous when she wasn't the center of their attention. When Ann dated a poet, Lucy not only demanded to know if he was a better writer, but she asked Ann if she loved the other poet better. Patchett's reply is a recurring theme of her four novels, the many ways of loving: "Of course I love you more, even though I believe it's perfectly possible to love more than one person and to love different people in different ways" (107).

During one of Grealy's last hospitalizations, she told Patchett that she wanted to write a book about her extraordinary friends, with a complete chapter on Ann. Patchett laughed that each visitor could produce a whole volume about Lucy. From sorrow and love, Patchett wrote her volume; but it is not simply a memoir of Lucy. In Autobiography of a Face, Grealy notes her excited discovery that "Language itself, words and images, could be wrought and shaped into vessels for the truth and beauty I had so long hungered for. Truth and Beauty is Patchett's well-wrought vessel for Lucy's third great hunger: friendship.

Joan Wylie Hall