|
Tuesday, June 01, 2004
I'm reading Truth and Beauty, Ann Patchett's newest book. It's a memoire about her friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy. The book seems to want to be about what an amazing person Grealy was, but in this it only partially succeeds. The Lucy in the book is plucky and wacky and given to lyrical outbursts, but not dramatically different in kind from all sorts of people one knows. Yet the book isn't a failure: it's just something quite different. What it is is an embodied demonstration of how much Patchett loved Lucy and how awful it is that loving someone, even loving someone so much, can't save them, from themselves or from the world. And of how difficult it is to be the one who survives, the one who has a life that inexplicably, immorally even, goes on.
posted by jeev |
3:37 PM |
 
|
|
