Kafka has this great line, \u201cA belief is like a guillotine: just as heavy, just as light.\u201d I could easily have titled a post about Ann Patchett\u2019s memoir of her friendship with poet and memoirist Lucy Grealy, \u201cA Friend Is Like a Guillotine\u2026.\u201d Lucy was light, literally\u2013she had jaw cancer as a child, and the chemotherapy, radiation and endless surgeries she endured left her unable to chew and barely able to swallow, so she weighed very little. Ann carries her many times throughout this book. At their first real meeting Lucy leaps up into her arms and wraps her legs around Ann\u2019s waist.<\/p>\n
And Ann\u2019s delighted. It\u2019s honestly refreshing, and kind of shocking, to read about someone responding to such transparent, childlike need with gratitude and joy rather than resentment. Ann loves to carry Lucy. She doesn\u2019t always love when Lucy sits on her lap at parties and demands to be told that Ann loves her best, but she basically does love the way their friendship is shaped for a long time. Lucy isn\u2019t a burden to her. Caring for Lucy\u2013cooking, cleaning, sorting through her financial chaos, flying to her aid\u2013speaks to something deep within Ann herself, fills her own hungers. Ann\u2019s needs, the ways in which she needs love, are less obvious and brutal than Lucy\u2019s. They\u2019re also satiable: In loving and being loved by Lucy, it seems, they basically were satiated; whereas Lucy was always hungry, insisting that she was alone in a crowd of people who loved her.<\/p>\n
The subtitle of Truth and Beauty<\/em> is \u201cA Friendship,\u201d and it really is a portrait of the friendship between these two women without ever becoming a full portrait of either woman herself. It\u2019s neither an autobiography of Ann nor a biography of Lucy, but a biography of their relationship. That\u2019s fascinating as a formal experiment\u2013can you depict only the vase between<\/em> the two faces?\u2013but it did leave me a little frustrated, feeling like my image of both women was kind of shallow.<\/p>\n What do they do and think when they\u2019re not relating to one another? Their family relationships and other friendships are bizarrely sketchy. And as their friendship begins to break down toward the end of Lucy\u2019s life, the book begins to seem like a net with holes in it: They\u2019re no longer woven tightly into one another\u2019s lives, and so the part of their lives they live together\u2013which is what the book is about\u2013encompasses less and less of who they are.<\/p>\n