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Synopsis

What happens when the person who is your family is someone you aren't bound to by blood?

What happens when the person you promise to love and honour for the rest of your life is not your lover, but your best friend? In her frank and startlingly intimate first work of non-fiction, Truth and Beauty, Ann Patchett shines light on the little explored world of women's friendships and shows us what it means to stand together.

Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and after enrolling in the Iowa Writers' Workshop began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work. In her critically acclaimed memoir, Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy wrote about the first half of her life: losing part of her jaw to childhood cancer, the years of chemotherapy and radiation, and then the endless reconstructive surgeries. In Truth and Beauty, the story isn't Lucy's life or Ann's life, but the parts of their lives they shared. 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 interwined. This is a tender, brutal book about loving the person we cannot save. It is about loyalty, and about being lifted up by the sheer effervescence of someone who knew how to live life to the fullest.