Truth and Beauty: A Friendship was published by HarperCollins in 2004. The book is Patchett’s memoir of her twenty-year friendship with Lucy Grealy, a poet and memoirist best known for Autobiography of a Face (1994), which described her childhood battle with Ewing’s sarcoma and the subsequent reconstructive surgeries that left her face permanently disfigured.
Patchett and Grealy met at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the mid-1980s and became inseparable: Grealy was charismatic, needy, brilliant, and self-destructive; Patchett was steady, disciplined, and devoted. The memoir traces their friendship from Iowa through Grealy’s periods of triumph (the success of Autobiography of a Face, fellowships, teaching positions) and crisis (failed surgeries, addiction to painkillers, romantic disasters, financial collapse). Grealy died of a heroin overdose in 2002, at thirty-nine, and the memoir is Patchett’s attempt to understand what happened — and to reckon with whether her own devotion enabled Grealy’s self-destruction rather than preventing it.
The book generated controversy. Grealy’s family and some of her friends felt that Patchett had appropriated Lucy’s story, had presented a one-sided portrait that emphasized Grealy’s dysfunction while showcasing Patchett’s own virtue, and had published intimate details that Lucy would not have wanted made public. Patchett’s sister, Suellen Grealy, published a rebuttal. The controversy raises genuine questions about the ethics of writing about the dead and about who owns a friendship’s narrative — questions the book itself partly anticipates but cannot fully resolve.
Collecting Truth and Beauty
First edition (HarperCollins, New York, 2004): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$35
- Very good: $8–$20