Memoir: Ann Patchett's account of her friendship with Lucy Grealy raises some awkward questions.
The telling moment of Truth & Beauty - a memoir of Ann Patchett's friendship with fellow writer Lucy Grealy - comes, perhaps, when Patchett is mopping Grealy's brow after yet another gruelling operation. Grealy wonders what she did to deserve such a loyal friend.
"You're a good friend to me, too," Patchett says.
No, Grealy says, it's not the same. "But at least I can make you feel like a saint. That's what you've always wanted."
It is as though Grealy, who died in 2002 of a heroin overdose, has dared to say out loud what the reader has begun, guiltily, to suspect. But then that's one of the interesting things about a friendship: the disparate reasons two people have for being in it. It's unlikely, however, that Patchett's memoir will result in her beatification, at least as far as the Grealy family is concerned; Lucy's sister has already published a riposte in the Guardian in which she accuses Patchett of exposing Grealy's frailties for her own gain: "My sister Lucy was a uniquely gifted writer. Ann, not so gifted, is lucky to be able to hitch her wagon to my sister's star".
It's a disingenuous description. Patchett, author of four novels, the last of which, Bel Canto, was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist and winner of the Orange Prize, doesn't need a star to hitch her wagon to. Grealy, on the other hand, published in 1994 a best-selling memoir, followed it with a not-so-successful collection of essays, then failed to complete a novel for which she had received a healthy advance. And, the renewed interest in Grealy's Autobiography of a Face - now reissued in the UK by Methuen - is due to the publication of Patchett's Truth & Beauty.
And yet, having read both memoirs, one can sympathize with the sister's grievances.
Grealy was born in 1963 in Dublin where her father Desmond was a television journalist .The family left for America when she was four . At the age of nine she was diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma, which resulted in the removal of a chunk of her jaw. Two years of chemotherapy and radiation followed. Over the next three decades, she underwent more than 30 - often unsuccessful - reconstructive surgeries. (Irradiated tissue often reabsorbs grafts, so Grealy's built-up jaw kept dissolving.) Her adolescence was a nightmare of self-consciousness and physical pain. She responded with a combination of stoicism, insecurity and chutzpah.
Patchett's memoir begins when the two women - in many ways opposites - shared an apartment while students at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Grealy leaves bowls of spaghetti on the living room floor ("The compromise was that I would do all the cleaning and cooking and that neither of us would complain about it . . .") and begins a relationship with a sadistic loser (". . . she was so hungry for attention and interpretation, she would take it wherever she could get it"). By that time, she had no bottom teeth and couldn't really close her mouth. Her jaw looked "as if one side had been collapsed by a brutal punch". A four-by-four gauze pad was taped to the side of her face, "part of a synthetic prosthesis that had worn a hole in her skin and was poking through".
After Iowa, Grealy heads to Aberdeen for more surgery. Ann gets a job at TGI Friday's in Nashville. She spends her tip money phoning Grealy. There's a constant exchange of letters. They wonder if they will ever become the writers they'd dreamed of being.
It is in Aberdeen that Grealy is at her most heroic. In a dreary flat in the dead of winter, in pain, lonely, taunted by drunken Scotsmen and amassing rejections from magazines and artists' colonies, Grealy retains her mordant sense of humour, as well as her work ethic.
And then, suddenly, she makes it. An article in Harper's wins her a National Magazine Award and leads to the book contract for Autobiography of a Face. She is featured on the Today show and on NPR. For a photo shoot, she disrobes and drapes herself in the limbs of a tree. Supermodels hail her on the streets of SoHo. She even has a date with George Stephanopoulos.
Traces of resentment creep in as Patchett relates her friend's rise to literary prominence, though it seems less a resentment of Grealy's success per se than of her blatant embrace of fame. Patchett had never realised "how abundantly prepared Lucy was to be famous". The reader, with Patchett as guide, begins to find Grealy attention-seeking and irresponsible.
It is here that Grealy's own memoir does what her friend's cannot. It allows us to see, first-hand, the kind of childhood experiences (in junior high, the verbal abuse was so bad, Grealy ate lunch alone every day in her counsellor's office) that resulted in that desperate desire to be gawked at for something other than her misshapen face, to have strangers say things to her other than: Hey! How did you get so ugly? Fame, in other words, is the end of junior high, and Grealy, understandably, loves it.
And then come "the heroin years", as Grealy gamely suggests they will one day refer to them. The stoic persona is cracking, the battle against loneliness lost. Having no lower teeth is becoming unbearable. (Grealy proposes they have a fund-raiser for her dental work and call it Let Her Eat Steak.)
A series of exhausting surgeries proves fruitless and leaves her on a dizzying array of prescription drugs. The deadline for her novel comes and goes. Patchett offers to write it for her: "Lucy shuddered. In trying . . . to be helpful, I had identified the lowest point to which she could possibly sink". The suicide attempts have begun. One night, perhaps accidentally, Grealy overdoses.
It's iffy to tell the secrets of the dead, especially the so recently dead. Should Patchett have reprinted Grealy's private letters to her? Should she have related episodes in Grealy's life that any of us would deem to be among the most private? Some of the uneasiness one feels in reading Patchett's compelling memoir arises from the fact that the author doesn't delve much into her own failings or indignities, though that may be partly because Patchett is, by her own admission, a bit of a square - "unglamorous, toiling" - while her friend was dramatic, spell-binding, evoking envy and admiration both.
In any case, the most important thing about Truth & Beauty may be that it leads readers to Grealy's own equally compelling memoir, and that will be Patchett's far greater tribute.
Truth & Beauty: A Friendship By Ann Patchett Fourth Estate, 257pp. £12.99
Molly McCloskey is a writer and critic