Truth and Beauty: A Friendship, Ann Patchett

Norman Rockwell, Doctor and Doll

(October 21) Not what I expected at all. When I first heard about Truth and Beauty, it sounded controversial and exciting. There were boards full of angry readers ranting about Lucy Grealy's life (was she immoral or clinically ill?) and Patchett's entitlement to the story (was she a vulture, an enabler or a true friend?). Then, Clemson University alumni and parents objected to the assignment of this book as required first-year reading, because it was pornographic and encouraged a sordid lifestyle. Patchett said this perception had blindsided her: "if anything, the criticisms of the book had erred on the side of, 'It's too sweet, too gentle.'" Elsewhere, talking about Lucy, Patchett makes it sound as if their friendship was a long litany of difficult, drama-queen moments: "Lucy was hard, she was a challenge. And she pushed us all to our limits... sometimes to our most horrible."

So then I read Truth and Beauty, anticipating a roller-coaster ride of moral challenges, harrowing escapades, deep feeling and intimate glimpses of a fascinating person. It had none of these things. Grealy's life doesn't come across as particularly edgy or lurid, certainly not enough to provoke the passionate denouncements and defenses on the discussion boards. She just sort of slips into heroin use in the last two years of her life, but Patchett is so distant and disapproving at this stage that we don't see any of the actual destructiveness of the addiction. It's a symbolic Bad Thing.

Nor is the book pornographic in any way, and Patchett definitely does not encourage imitation of any of Lucy's racier activities, which are anyway only mildly racy. It's a complete mystery to me what the Clemson U protesters could have found offensive.

It's not sweet, either. It has what should be touching moments here and there, but Patchett never communicates any of what it was she loved about Grealy, even though she states many times that she did love her. I expected Patchett to rise to the challenge of explaining why limit-pushing Lucy was so beloved by so many people, but at best she makes Lucy sound like a quirky pet or doll and at worst she dwells on the behaviours that would make Lucy unappealing. (These amount to nothing more than irresponsibility with money and a habit of jumping unexpectedly into your arms or lap.)

Truth and Beauty is really mostly about Patchett, and about how "slow and steady wins the race," even though the hare steals all the best scenes. It's Patchett’s apology for being dull and stodgy -- she's claiming dull-and-stodgy kept Lucy alive.

So the title “Truth and Beauty” is really kind of vengeful, after all; it's not the reference to Keatsian transcendentalism it promises to be.

Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy

Pablo Picasso, Crying Head (V)

(September 27) I really liked this little book, for both the content -- for being allowed to gawk at the harrowing experiences of a young girl who spent her childhood undergoing brutal treatments for cancer and then the rest of her life horribly disfigured by it all -- and for the writing as well, which is as clear and light and easy as hearing oneself think. You wish you knew Lucy Grealy, feel bad for what she went through, are sorry she died, feel cheated of other writing she might have done.

I came to this book in a very roundabout way -- it is the companion-piece to Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty, which was just being promoted when I was reading Bel Canto. I was certain I wanted to read only more fiction by Patchett, not a memoir -- and, in any case, Lucy Grealy sounded from the reviews like a fatiguing prima donna of a girl, pace her illness and disfigurement. I went ahead and read Patchett's three other novels, and was consequently, sadly, on the verge of losing all interest in her, when a BookCEL member pointed the group to a special series in The Atlantic on the controversy at Clemson University over Truth and Beauty. I read the interview of Patchett there, watched the video of her speech, listened to the NPR interview with Lucy Grealy, then finally bought the Atlantic fiction issue to read the essay "My Pornography" by Patchett. Lucy now was fascinating, charismatic, irresistible.

I now know from Autobiography of a Face and from the lengthy interview on NPR that she can't have been diva-like and over-the-top all the time -- Patchett must have deliberately exaggerated this; or else the stories she chooses to tell about Grealy in the Atlantic essay are focused on this unconsciously. But I am just about to read Truth and Beauty (sorry, Success Principles; it’s just not working out between us), and I suspect I’ll see that Grealy romanticized herself as an adult in Autobiography of a Face. You know she wasn’t 100 per cent drama queen nor could she have been 100 per cent Beth March in Little Women, but you can also sense the romanticizing filter in the book itself. The detailed scenes Grealy recreates from her childhood have the unexpectedness of real life, but her quick trip through her adult years offers details that mostly sound like literature -- those dull thunks of poetic justice, irony, "ain’t it true?", etc. -- the careful hand of the artisan. Even the expression toward the end gives me the feeling of the smoke-machine being wheeled out. I don’t hold it against her -- it was her own life she had to go on living, after all, once she finished writing the book (and scored the cash). But I don't feel like I'll have met her real adult self till Truth and Beauty finally wends its way to the Dundas branch of the Hamilton Public Library.

And I do have a private theory that Patchett might have caricatured / infantilized Grealy a little bit out of jealousy. I think, on the basis of one little book, that Lucy might have been the better writer. They are similar writers -- there's a whole generation using this voice, actually -- but Patchett is ever so slightly... sedate. Some would call it "polished."

By way of contrast here is a small sample of Lucy that is, to me, transporting:

The third life took place after school, and all day during the summer, when I went to my horse, Swinger, with whom I was conducting nothing less than a romantic relationship.

I knew his whole being. There was not one part of his body I could not touch, not one part of his personality I did not know at least as well as my own. When we went on long rides through the woods, I would tell him everything I knew and then explain why I loved him so much, why he was special, different from other horses, how I would take care of him for the rest of his life, never leave him or let anyone harm him. After the ride I would take him to graze in an empty field. I would lie down on his broad bare back and think I was the luckiest girl alive, his weight shifting beneath me as he moved toward the next bite of grass. Sometimes I took him to the stream and laughed as he pawed at the water, screaming in delight when he tried to lie down in it. Best of all was when I happened to find him lying down in his stall. Carefully, so as not to spook him, I’d creep in and lie down on top of his giant body, his great animal heat and breath rising up to swallow my own smaller heat and less substantial air.