After reading Ann Patchett’s This Is The Story Of A Happy Marriage I had to go back and read this book. Firstly because I learnt Ann writes non fiction just as beautifully as she does her fiction and secondly she talks in the book about a controversy surrounding Truth & Beauty.
In 2006, Clemson University assigned Truth & Beauty to the freshman class and Ann was invited to give the Convocation Address. However one parent deemed the book inappropriate, the media got involved and mass ignorance ensued. Ann details the events in ‘“The Love Between the Two Women Is Not Normal”’ in her frank and forthright style, her humour keeping you from boiling with outrage. After reading the book the whole incident seems even more ridiculous and also I sense more hurtful that Ann let on in her piece.
Truth & Beauty is the story of Ann’s friendship with Lucy Grealy. Lucy had a highly aggressive form of cancer when she was a child which left her with a badly disfigured jaw. Lucy had numerous operations throughout her life to try and correct and/or alleviate her disfigurement.
Lucy’s whole life was (rightly and wrongly) dominated by her face. It defined how people treated her and it defined how she saw herself. It was a part of who she was and shaped her as a person, good and bad. It was also a burden that became impossible for her to bear but her friends were always there to help pull her through.
Ann met Lucy at college but they became friends when they both attended the Iowa Writers Workshop together. Their lives and careers became entwined from that day forward. Ann writes about her friendship with Lucy warts and all. The good times and the bad. The times when Lucy was on top of the world and vice versa. How they supported each other through thick and thin and all the difficulties any friendship faces along the way.
Ann tells the story of her friendship with Lucy with clarity and emotion, with honesty and understanding. Heart breaking and gut wrenching. Truth and beauty. Ann Patchett at her best.
Buy the book here…
In an age when everyone and their niece has written a tell-all book, when even fictional characters like Ron Burgundy are penning the stories of their lives, how does a memoir stand out among its peers? What qualities make it like nothing we've seen before? Sometimes truly extraordinary experiences can launch a memoir into uncharted [...]
I read this during a formative period when I was not a teenager anymore but not quite an adult. It was perfect timing. All of my foibles and insecurities were obliterated with this poignant memoir of a girl who has a rare type of bone cancer in her jaw and undergoes surgery and later reconstructive [...]
Each teaching semester at Penn I choose the memoirs I want the class to dwell on, learn from. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The Duke of Deception. House of Prayer No. 2. Running in the Family. Slices from Annie Dillard, Patricia Hampl, Vivian Gornick, the memoiristic poetry of Pablo Neruda. More.
This semester we're reading three, and this weekend I was preparing my notes for our coming discussion of Lucy Grealy's
Autobiography of a Face, a book with so much to teach that I filled six pages with citations and notes and sent my students more
consider-this questions than perhaps a teacher should. As a child, Lucy has cancer. As a teen and young woman she endures more than thirty surgeries—first to remove the tumor from her jaw, then to try to resurrect her face. That's the back story, but it isn't the reason this is such teach-worthy memoir. I will teach Lucy Grealy tomorrow because of her reach—her attempt to make sense, her generosity, her thematic juxtapositions.
Autobiography is full of passages such as this:
By the end of my freshmen year I'd gained a reputation as one of the better poets on campus, which aided the development of my artistic persona. How trivial to actually think about one's appearance. The attire of my fellow scruffy artists told the world to recognize them as geniuses too preoccupied to care about anything as mundane as clothes. But for me, dressing as if I didn't care was an attempt not to care, to show the world I wasn't concerned with what it thought of my face. In my carefully orchestrated shabbiness, I was hoping to beat the world to the finish line by showing that I already knew I was ugly. Still, all the while, I was secretly hoping that in the process some potential lover might accidentally notice I was wearing my private but beautiful heart on my stained and fraying sleeve.
This is my home, my table where I sit with family and friends. Tomorrow I'll take this spirit of community (pretend there are flowers, pretend there are candles), and we'll talk.
Autobiography of a Face and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly are so beautiful! They are two of my all-time favorite memoirs. I prefer Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life over his brother Geoffrey Wolffs' The Duke of Deception. But both are excellent.
I wish I could sit in your class. But at least I have been lucky enough to do so in the past. Remember Penn's annual writing conference? So good. I wish Penn still ran that.
No surprise that your family place is so warm and welcoming.
Have a good teaching day.
Oh, there is so much great writing. Tobias's book is wonderful reading, but he himself has noted how much fiction has crept in (all that dialogue is a dead give away). DUKE seeks answers to big questions, where as Tobias tells a very engaging story.
Your home lovely - just like its Mistress.
Pretty sure what the next book I'm ordering is. Thanks for sharing all this goodness, Beth.
One thing that struck me the most from this book was its exploration of the old expectation women can't seem to kick no matter how liberated we become: women are judged on their external beauty so often that, God help us, we start judging ourselves using the same stingy, demanding yardstick. It is always easy to see the beauty in others, to want to whack that yardstick out of their hands when they start measuring themselves against it. But they cling to the yardstick, as we do in our turn.
Grealy's book is a wonder, and so is Ann Patchett's memoir of their friendship, Truth and Beauty. They make an interesting pairing.
I have considered The Duke of Deception for class, but isn't it still out of print? I guess students can get used copies easily enough, though.