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    Truth & Beauty
    Truth & Beauty
    Truth & Beauty
    Audiobook8 hours

    Truth & Beauty

    Written by Ann Patchett

    Narrated by Ann Patchett

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    ""A loving testament to the work and reward of the best friendships, the kind where your arms can’t distinguish burden from embrace.” — People

    New York Times Bestselling author Ann Patchett’s first work of nonfiction chronicling her decades-long friendship with the critically acclaimed and recently deceased author, Lucy Grealy.

    Ann Patchett and the late Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and, after enrolling in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work. In Gealy's critically acclaimed and hugely successful 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 together. 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 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 uplifted by the sheer effervescence of someone who knew how to live life to the fullest.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJul 27, 2004
    ISBN9780060782733
    Truth & Beauty
    Author

    Ann Patchett

    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 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.

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    Reviews for Truth & Beauty

    4/5

    916 ratings74 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Seemed more focused on the author than the person who was the subject of the book. A little self-referential.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I read the Autobiography Of A Face and then came to this one because I was so fascinated with Lucy Grealys life.
      I cannot imagine living the life Lucy endured let alone the heartache of watching her suffer her entire life.
      Ann was able to capture the love they shared throughout these pages. The raw emotion contained in this story will leave me thinking about it for along time to come.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I read this book over a rainy weekend. The story stayed in my mind long after I finished and definitely prompted me to want to learn more about Lucy.
    • 3/5
      True story of friendship between Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy from College (Sara Lawrence) to Grealy's suicide 20 years later. Both were writers who reached a level of notoriety. Grealy had 38 surgeries during her life, the result of Ewing's Sarcoma of the jaw and the lethal amounts of chemo and radiation she was subjected to as a child. I had read Grealy's memoir, "Autobiography of a Face" years ago. Loved Patchett's "Bel Canto" so was interested in reading this. Grealy could eat almost nothing as her jaw was sunken in and she had almost no teeth. Her last surgeries were to give implant teeth but her mouth couldn't handle the weight. She began a ride of pain killers, Oxy, heroin and tried committing suicide before it finally worked. She had people who loved her but she wanted a man to love her and though she had countless men and endless sex no one wanted her for keeps.
    • 3/5
      Good. Touching memoir of a deep friendship.
    • 4/5
      Memoir of Patchett's friendship with Lucy Grealy (author of the inspiring Autobiography Of A Face) is a combination of dialogue, memory and letters detailing the symbiotic relationship much like that of the ant and the grasshopper. Ann was the ant...the steady one who provided support and a strong shoulder of Lucy to lean on in her struggles with drug addiction and low self-esteem due to her disfigured face resulting from cancer radiation treatments and multiple surgeries. Lucy ultimately dies at age 39 of an overdose. Patchett writes with lyrical style and grace and conveys the message that sometimes loving a person is not enough to save them from themselves.
    • 4/5
      A gripping memoir about a long and lasting friendship and the communion of two souls across a long distance. Ann and Lucy have been friends since college, drawn together by their shared desire to become writers and a deeper ineffable affinity. Plagued by insecurities and struggling with her health, Lucy has a hard time focusing on anything for long. Diagnosed with cancer as a child, she went through so much chemo that she lost most of her teeth and part of her jaw. Since then she has had over 30 surgeries try to make her face a bit more socially acceptable.Ann walks through her friend's surgeries with her, suffering alongside her. But when the final surgery fails Lucy goes into a tailspin. Depressed, addicted, and greatly weakened, she sinks deeper and deeper - attempting suicide frequently. Ultimately, she dies of an accidental overdose leaving a cloud of friends to mourn her and Ann to eulogize her with this book. Deeply moving and incredibly personal.
    • 5/5
      I expected something more like a biography of Lucy Grealy. I don't know why. Nothing in the description necessarily should have suggested that to me, but that's what I expected. What I found, however, was more the biography of a friendship. Patchett writes honestly and poignantly about her decades-long friendship with Lucy Grealy and how this relationship and the loss of it shaped her life. It helped me see both what I want in a friendship with another woman and what I don't want. And it helped me to better see how much influence the people I'm close to have in my life.

      From a technical standpoint, I really liked the structure of the memoir. The mixture of correspondence and recollection flowed well and wasn't tied strictly to the chronological, just like our recollections of our lives aren't often strictly chronological. We juxtapose the parts that seem to go together in order to highlight the particular meaning they have for us. As always, I loved reading about the writers' lives, especially seeing how very differently two brilliant writers went about being brilliant.
    • 4/5
      A mix between memoir and biography, with Patchett recounting her friendship with Lucy Grealy. It's a lovely read, touching on writing, illness and love, but really all about the bonds of friendship.
    • 4/5
      Ann Patchett has written an amazingly candid memoir of her intense and complicated, frustrating but rewarding friendship with Lucy Grealy, the celebrated author of Authobiography of a Face. The two women knew each other, vaguely, as undergraduates at Sarah Lawrence, became instant “best friends” as graduate students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and, up until Lucy’s death of a drug overdose in 2002, were intricately, perhaps even obsessively, involved in each other’s personal and professional lives. Truth & Beauty: A Friendship is a paean to that involvement, an intimate tracing of a kind of commitment and care that seem rare in any relationship, let alone a relationship between two ambitious, potentially rivalrous writers. It is essentially a love story, a narrative at once heartbreakingly tender and fiercely frank, which Patchett tells with an extraordinary deftness of touch and tone.Lucy was not an easy person. Nor could one expect her to be. She had lost a good part of her left jaw to cancer as a child, endured painful rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, suffered through thirty-odd reconstructive surgeries, most of which did nothing to "repair" her face nor allow her to eat easily or much. But worse than these, she was forced to live with the unrelenting cruelty of people who mocked or recoiled from her "ugliness". This harrowing experience is what she set down in the award-winning memoir that put her on the map as a writer, a book that, for a time, brought her celebrity and wealth but couldn’t finally sustain her in a world which values and rewards only conventional beauty. Lucy needed more than fame; she wanted love. And while she certainly found a heroic species of that in Patchett, she wanted the full-blown romantic version as well. Extravagant, audacious, mercurial, Lucy was enormously attractive as a personality, but that did not satisfy her longing to be loved “as a woman.” Her brilliance and wit, her ability to galvanize and entertain any crowd, could not keep her from paralysing bouts of loneliness and depression or, in the end, from a lethal addiction to heroin.And yet, in spite of the steady downward tug on her life, there was much joy in it too, and much to celebrate. Patchett does justice to this side of Lucy, showing her huge appetite for experience, her refusal to play it all as tragedy. The two women (in Patchett’s view a classic pairing of her plodding tortoise with Lucy’s breathless hare) drink and dance, write and travel. They console each other while trying to get a publisher, get a fellowship, or get a boyfriend, and toast each other when they finally make it into print or into Yaddo or into bed. But Patchett’s sad awareness that she can not “save” this talented and vibrant individual casts a real poignancy over this wonderfully shaded portrait of a difficult but beautiful friendship.
    • 4/5
      I just finished reading Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty: A Friendship, which chronicles the relationship of the author with the late Lucy Grealy. This book has been on my must-read list ever since I read Patchett's account of Clemson's attempt to censor it from their incoming freshman class. Based upon the brouhaha the book the book created, I expected something in the book that would have earned it the label certain members of the Clemson community gave it: pornographic. Of course I read it more because I enjoy Patchett's ability to engage in lyric reminiscence than because I was expecting to read steamy love scenes between the two girls. In that regard, I was left scratching my head and uttering a bemused, “huh?” for this decidedly PG-rated book. It turns out the relationship between Ann and Lucy was more mother-daughter than loverly (with Ann decidedly taking on the maternal role most of the time). Truth and Beauty is decidedly not about sex. It’s about the love of two writers who found each other in college and maintained a friendship through thick and thin. Most of the “thin” revolved around Lucy. Patchett paints Lucy as a dynamic human, the type of girl that couldn’t be ignored, a troubled woman whom everyone seemed to love but who, paradoxically, felt perpetually alone. Lucy was plagued by depression and insecurity, which seemed to be the natural outflow of living life with a face that had been stolen from her in childhood through the violent cancer treatments she underwent for Ewing’s sarcoma (a rare cancer of the jaw). She survived the treatments, but they left her with little lower jaw and no teeth. The fallout from her chemo and radiation also left Lucy with invisible scars that marred her ability to believe that she was lovable. Yet, Ann and countless others DID love Lucy. That’s because Lucy Grealy was, among many things, lovable immeasurable it seemed, creative, and full of candor. Lucy Grealy was stunning writer. And she was honest, whimsical and a force to be reckoned with. Ann’s depiction of their friendship paints not the sad tale of a manic-depressive, self-centered girl, but of a woman who was nuanced and vivacious. Though Lucy would never paint herself as a hero, I believe that Patchett saw her as one, though perhaps of a different sort than the “triumph over tragedy” trope. Patchett shares her perspective on Lucy, and it’s clear that this perspective is one of love, though not the rose-colored glasses kind. Lucy was needy, but this need tapped into something maternal in Ann. So while some would argue that Anne pandered to Lucy’s temperament, I would argue that these two girls loved each other fiercely and that they just enjoyed each other. Lucy cheered Ann. Ann’s practicality balanced Lucy’s more flighty tendency. And Lucy Grealy was self-deprecatingly FUNNY. The nature of their relationship is revealed through vignettes and letters written by Lucy during the many years in which they lived apart pursuing fellowships, teaching at different colleges, or while Lucy (Scottish by birth) spent a year abroad undergoing facial reconstructive surgeries.Whoever Lucy Grealy was, she was a complex woman who had dreams, spunk and talent in spades. I believe this account honors her life, though, like Lucy’s sister who lambasted Patchett for writing Truth and Beauty so soon after Lucy’s death, I wonder if Patchett should have waited a bit to publish the book. I understand her need to memorialize her friend, but I do question the wisdom of her timing. While I can see her sister’s point, the work itself still stands as a narrative that shines a light on what was one of the greatest loves of Patchett’s life. Sorry Clemson, the love between two women IS normal (even though this one was decidedly of the amicable-not-amorous, variety after all).
    • 4/5
      While Anne bolds her presence in Lucy’s life, Lucy never mentioned Anne in her book” autobiography of a face.” It is strange!
    • 4/5
      Ann Patchett is a fantastic writer and this memior / biography is a page turner as the story unfolds over the years (NOT typically the type of story that is a page turner!). Filled with descriptive language and the author's unique perspective. This is ultimately a sad story of artistic talent that is mired in personal problems and demons. But supported by friends to the end.
    • 4/5
      Terribly sad but a beautiful look into the never ending love between two friends.
    • 5/5
      The strangest friendship you will ever discover. Not always feel good, but thoroughly perplexing and thought provoking.
    • 5/5
      Truth & Beauty is an endearing, wonderfully written memoir about the friendship and love between Ann Patchett and her friend, memoirist/poet, Lucy Grealy. Complete opposites, Patchett aptly compares their relationship to Aesop's fable characters: the grasshopper, ant, tortoise and hare."What the story didn't tell you is that the ant relented at the eleventh hour and took in the grasshopper when the weather was hard, fed him on his tenderest store of grass all winter. The tortoise, being uninterested in such things, gave over his medal to the hare. Grasshoppers and hares find the ants and tortoises. They need us to survive, but we need them as well. They were the ones who brought the truth and beauty to the party, which Lucy could tell you as she recited Keats over breakfast, was better than food any day."Gah, I just loved this book so much! This is a book that will make you call in sick to work just so you can finish it. You may just cry, and if not cry, then seriously reflect on the friends and dear loved ones you know. What circumstances bring people into our lives just when we need them? Are they here for a season or a lifetime? So much food for thought.Grealy endured countless operations on her face due to treatment of cancer when she was young. Despite never being happy with her appearance and being constantly overwhelmed with the fear of never being loved, her larger than life personality and poetic genius is the legacy that she left behind. Patchett's loving tribute to her dear friend was a wonderful reading experience. For two days I got to see behind the "writer's curtain" and all that goes into writing a book.Also I should add that this is a book that begs to be discussed. My mom isn't much of a reader, but two mornings in a row we found ourselves having coffee at the kitchen table discussing the characters; she even allowed me to read complete passages. I'm not one for highlighting my books or folding pages, but I just couldn't help myself! I devoured this book. One thing we agreed on this morning while I was filling her in on the ending, she said, "You better make sure to buy Autobiography of a Face. We'll have to discuss it on late night long distance phone calls." Consider it done, ma!
    • 4/5
      I hate addiction! Yet, even though I know better, my anger is often directed at those around the addict who allowed themselves to be fooled. If you are that stupid, you deserve whatever pain the addict created in your life. But that's only, so I don't have to see myself in the behavior of the addict. It forces me to look directly into the eyes of those who love me and know again how readily I was to throw them all away for a drink. My career, my marriage, my children, none were enough to stand between me and the bottle. I'm so sorry, Ann, and Lucy's friends experienced her loss, but infinitely grateful Ann shared the tragedy. My prayer is that none will ever have to pass through it again. But we will.
    • 5/5
      An almost perfect love letter to a friendship, memoir, autobiography. Honest, precise, restrained writing, yet poignant. It reminded me of the best and the worst of my classmates from Sarah Lawrence (where the author and her friend first met, and I also went years later). She describes the perfect mix of 'talent and exhibitionism' that defines the student body there. Such a perfect like I actually remembered it.
    • 5/5
      Not sure why the reviews are so negative, I really enjoyed this telling of a unique, interesting friendship with a writer who went on to become famous. I read autobiography of a face in high school and that book always stuck with me so I found this story about Lucy Greeley to be fascinating. I couldn't stop listening and I'm sad the story is over. Patchett is a good writer and makes you feel as though you are in the friendship with them. I recommend this book for anyone interested in the authors, codependency and addiction or just wanting to listen to a unique story.
    • 4/5
      Complaining that the book was hastily published after Lucy Grealy's overdose, her sister Suellen Grealy calls Ann Patchett a grief thief. And describes in an article in the Guardian how insensitive and simplified she found Ann Patchett's portrait of Lucy in her book. That knowledge has overshadowed my listening to the audio-book, which is well narrated by the writer herself and an easy, bestseller style listen that - despite all its heartfelt and surprisingly detailed recollection and the devastating final two chapters - leaves a weird taste in my mouth. If I could "believe" what Ann Patchet writes to be "true" it would be an amazing memoir of friendship, genius and the lives of writers. But Suellen's complain weighs heavily against that.
    • 3/5
      I'm struggling to verbalize why I gave this book three stars, considering the fact that I didn't like it very much.

      The story is interesting, sure. Lucy Grealy had cancer as a child, and as a result, had her jawbone removed and endured many, many reconstructive surgeries. I guess that's what kept me reading the whole time - wondering what would happen to her. I had never heard of Lucy before reading this book, so I didn't know what her cause of death would be. I assumed it would be somehow related to the cancer, or that there would be complications during one of her many surgeries.

      I don't know how much of this book really was true. I hope that most of it was, because honestly, Lucy Grealy did not come across as a likable person. So either she really was that awful, or Patchett spent an entire book making her best friend sound a whole lot worse than she really was. I hope it's the former. It seemed obvious to me that Lucy had numerous psychological issues; I am not a doctor, but she should have been in therapy at a very, very young age. Her clinginess and neediness were off the charts, and she engaged in self-destructive behavior constantly.

      But then you have to ask yourself how anyone could have gone through what Lucy did and not be completely screwed up.

      I guess that after reading this book, I feel torn and worn out. I feel so sorry for Lucy because of what she went through, and I feel sorry for the friends that she seemed to have taken advantage of. I'm sorry that her family had to see Lucy's life end the way it did, and that they had to deal with the publication of this book.

      And like, seriously though, Lucy seemed REALLY messed up. Like, to a ridiculous degree. She just seemed awful. I was so angry at her during most of the book. As I've said before, I think I should probably just stay away from memoirs.
    • 4/5
      For bringing renewed attention to Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy I say bravo. But as a work itself, I was a more than a little disappointed. To disclose, Lucy Grealy was for a very short time one of my instructors in graduate school. I didn't know her. She behaved badly. My writing group broke away from hers. She didn't review my work. I was curious about her, curious about why she behaved badly. She died later that year I learned a little something. In Truth and Beauty, Ann Patchett makes an attempt at telling me what I want to know. They were friends, Patchett and Grealy, good friends and so I expected to find something in Patchett's work about Grealy's mental state and how it played into their friendship and I did. But I also got the very distinct impression that Patchett was holding back, way back, that she wasn't fully disclosing with the reader why she would maintain a relationship, actually chase after a relationship with someone who treated her so poorly. This book made me curious not about Grealy and the friendship, but about the inner workings of Patchett herself. If I was to appreciate the friendship than I had to know the two friends and Patchett didn't let me inside of her. Patchett on the page became the weakness of the book. A shame.
    • 4/5
      I very much like the writing of this author. I own many of her books and hope to read them all. Her writing style is beautiful and focuses on every-day life situations that change us.This is a true story of a deep and long-term friendship between the author and her friend and author Lucy Grealy. Lucy developed cancer in her chin when she was ten. The invasive cancer took over her life, and as a result she became increasingly needy.Both Grealy and Patchett attended Sarah Lawrence college as undergraduates. They did not become friends there, but developed a friendship when both were accepted to the Iowa Writers Workshop. This became a life-long relationship. The story focuses on Ann's ability to weather the storms of 36 surgeries with Lucy.Grealy had every right to her pain, but her neediness was way over the top, as she forced her group of friends to give and give and give. Actually, a few years ago I had to take stock of a relationship I had with a very needy friend. Much like Lucy, she wore me down with her constant requests and selfishness. Lucy reminded me of my previous friend. But, unlike Ann Patchett, I found enough was enough and confronted my friend. Knowing it would not change her, I still felt she was due an explanation.Patchett hung in there to the very end of Grealy's life. I found Grealy's selfishness and narcissism way over the top. And while the author notes how Lucy sucked the air out of the room, she continued to be by her side throughout Lucy's disfigurement and many surgeries. A gifted writer, Lucy lost touch with the definition of reciprocity. Simply reading about her wore me down.Patchett displayed a great deal of fortitude and strength in hanging in there with this needy "friend." At the risk of sounding judgmental, Patchett's ability to love her friend throughout self imposed financial crisis' and blatant demands and use of those in her life was admirable, but I would have not had the fortitude of the author.When a book helps us look inside, I deem it worth reading. As I read about Ann and Lucy's relationship, I realized I couldn't tolerate Lucy's selfishness and manipulation. I recommend this book as I very much like Patchett's style.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      A paean to the friendship of Lucy Grealey and Ann Patchett. Fascinating if you've read autobiography of a face.
    • 3/5
      The initial interaction between Patchett and Lucy Grealy, the woman who would become her lifelong friend, sets the tone not only for the book but for the entire relationship. While they had both attended Sara Lawrence College at the same time, they were not friends there – not even acquaintances. But on learning that both had been accepted at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Grealy wrote to Patchett and more or less instructed Patchett to find a suitable apartment for her as she apparently didn’t have time to make her own living arrangements. And Patchett, who was “flattered to be asked for help” by someone who “had the pull of celebrity” never considered turning down the peremptory assignment. On their first face-to-face meeting at the duplex Patchett found for them to share, Grealy burst into tears and leaped into Patchett’s arms, “staking out this spot … and I was to hold her for as long as she wanted to stay”.And that pretty much sums up the rest of the book.Grealy, who developed cancer of the jaw in childhood and suffered disfiguring surgeries and debilitating chemotherapy and radiation treatments as a result, spent the rest of her life seeking what she saw as normality – reconstructive surgeries which inevitably failed, love affairs which she either torpedoed or simply abandoned, financial gains that she frittered away as quickly as she came into them, professional acclaim whose early promise she was never able to develop fully, and always – always – assurances from the people around her that she was worthy of being loved.At some point in this memoir, the reader must ask the essential question – at what point in a person’s life does the physical and emotional battering they have suffered grant them license to become a bottomless pit of neediness? And what emotional payoff comes to the attendants at that person’s altar?There is no question that Patchett genuinely loved Grealy. She lists ‘Truth & Beauty’ as “a friendship”, but it is nothing less than a love story, complete with obsession, loss, and an inevitable tragic ending. But Patchett seems, by and large, a reasonably well-adjusted person, and one may be forgiven for asking what she was getting out of this relationship in return. What the reader will get is a guided tour through what it means to love someone, even with the realization that sometimes, loving them is not enough to save them from themselves.
    • 3/5
      After reading several other LT reviews I feel vindicated about my own ambivalent reaction to this book. I have read several of Ann Patchett's books and decided to go back and read others that I had missed. Truth & Beauty is the account of the friendship between Ann and Lucy Grealy. Lucy was damaged, both physically and mentally, by her childhood affliction with cancer, which caused her to lose part of her jaw. She spent the rest of her life having surgery after surgery in an attempt to reconstruct her face to make it look "normal." It was grueling, and it played a large part in her inability to write much after her initial success as a poet. I couldn't help but wonder what about her attracted so many people to Lucy. She had a large number of extremely devoted friends, and Ann was the most devoted of all. However, Lucy seemed ungrateful most of the time. She was extremely needy, constantly demanding reassurance that she was loved, attractive, talented, and desirable. She used people without compunction. She was unable to summon the self-discipline required to devote herself to writing. Though the obituaries that I found attributed her death to cancer, she actually died of a drug overdose - this fact I find understandable, considering the degree of pain that she suffered. This book was well-written, as all of Patchett's books are, but I would have appreciated knowing what exactly attracted people to Lucy in a way that drew their life-long devotion.
    • 4/5
      With a title like that, the reader has high expectations which Patchett meets, for the most part. Her loving memoir of an intensely close friendship has so much to offer, especially in delineating those relationships during young womanhood. Later, my empathy for Lucy waned; I don't think I could have had the patience and loyalty that Ann did for such deeply needy person. I'm glad she was able to include some of Lucy's letters so that we could hear her own voice coming through and not need to rely completely on Ann's fond memories. Still, in the second half of the book, the letters are absent and I missed that voice. At the same time, I wasn't as convinced as Ann was that Lucy was a genius writer, but will have to read her own "Autobiography of a Face" to be certain.
    • 5/5
      An unconditional love for a friend is what I took from Ann Patchett's relationship with her friend, Lucy. Lucy had many struggles in life including cancer as a child, disfigurement from the cancer, low self-esteem, addiction to pain killers. Ann was an incredible friend and found the joy in Lucy. Even though Lucy was quite needy at times, Ann saw her as the amazing person she was and told that story beautifully in this book of friendship. It's not a nice, uplifting story, but one of raw feelings and emotions that these friends experienced.
    • 3/5
      I'm struggling to verbalize why I gave this book three stars, considering the fact that I didn't like it very much.

      The story is interesting, sure. Lucy Grealy had cancer as a child, and as a result, had her jawbone removed and endured many, many reconstructive surgeries. I guess that's what kept me reading the whole time - wondering what would happen to her. I had never heard of Lucy before reading this book, so I didn't know what her cause of death would be. I assumed it would be somehow related to the cancer, or that there would be complications during one of her many surgeries.

      I don't know how much of this book really was true. I hope that most of it was, because honestly, Lucy Grealy did not come across as a likable person. So either she really was that awful, or Patchett spent an entire book making her best friend sound a whole lot worse than she really was. I hope it's the former. It seemed obvious to me that Lucy had numerous psychological issues; I am not a doctor, but she should have been in therapy at a very, very young age. Her clinginess and neediness were off the charts, and she engaged in self-destructive behavior constantly.

      But then you have to ask yourself how anyone could have gone through what Lucy did and not be completely screwed up.

      I guess that after reading this book, I feel torn and worn out. I feel so sorry for Lucy because of what she went through, and I feel sorry for the friends that she seemed to have taken advantage of. I'm sorry that her family had to see Lucy's life end the way it did, and that they had to deal with the publication of this book.

      And like, seriously though, Lucy seemed REALLY messed up. Like, to a ridiculous degree. She just seemed awful. I was so angry at her during most of the book. As I've said before, I think I should probably just stay away from memoirs.