Brilliance can be rough on friendships. In the tender story of her relationship with the writer Lucy Grealy, novelist Ann Patchett is the dutiful gardener to Grealy’s demanding flower. Grealy endured a lifetime of excruciating surgeries to repair the lower jaw she lost to cancer as a child. Her best-selling memoir, Autobiography of a Face shot her into the spotlight and a swirl of financial and emotional chaos. Patchett was there to clean up the mess.
When Lucy Grealy died in 2002 of an apparent drug overdose, Patchett was left to clean up for herself. Her new book is an elegy to a friendship, with all its truths, beauties and imperfections. It’s the powerlessness of watching a friend not waving, but drowning.
Guests:
Ann Patchett, Pen/Faulkner Award-Winning novelist and author of the new memoir, “Truth & Beauty.”