About this book
<p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p>
About Unknown Author
Ann Patchett was born in Los Angeles, California, and moved with her family to Nashville, Tennessee at age six. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 1990, during a residential fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, she wrote her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, which was named a New York Times Notable Book for 1992. Her second novel, Taft (1994), was awarded the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for fiction. Her fourth novel, Bel Canto (2001), won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize, and sold over a million copies in the United States. Her memoir, Truth & Beauty, which chronicled her relationship with Lucy Grealy during Grealy's death from cancer, was published in 2004. She was the editor for Best American Short Stories 2006.
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