Book 35: Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett
This is the first book I've picked up in a while that I haven't had to struggle through. I'm reading a couple fiction books right now, and it's just such slow going. Maybe I only really like creative non-fiction and essays, and everything else is a chore to read.
I've only read two other things from Ann Patchett and both were Vogue US essays about her dog, Rose, the first the story of the adoption of the dog, and the second of the dog's very old age.They stick in my memory because she wondered in the first article why it is that we accept and love our pets in an uncondtional way where we accept and even cherish their 'badness' whereas we can't do the same for people. Which I found intensely irritating - standards should be higher for people, that's why - and kind of cute at the same time.
The thing is, according to this memoir about Patchett's friendship with the writer Lucy Grealy, she really did adopt some people and love them in a pet-like way, for their good and their bad parts. She even calls Grealy 'pet' as a nickname, and Grealy is forever leaping into arms of the much taller and sturdier Patchett, to be carried about. She also accepts and forgives Grealy's occasional meanness. She tells an anecdote about dressing up in a sexy mini for a party she was going to go with Grealy to, and Grealy telling her solemnly that she looked like a total slut in that skirt. Patchett, persuaded, changed into something less attractive, and waited for Grealy, and then Grealy appears, wearing the skirt she tricked Patchett into taking off, and says to her, "Gotcha."
Um.
Patchett doesn't say what happened after that (but the book goes on to describe her being a caretaker to Grealy thereafter, for years) but I found this very alarming. Oh, I forgot to say - Grealy is the author of "Autobiography of a Face" and through a childhood battle with cancer, had a large chunk of her lower jaw amputated so that her face was deformed, and the lifelong series of surgeries she went through to try to reconstruct the jaw never really worked, with each result eventually melting away and getting reabsorbed by the body. Grealy spent most of her adult life without teeth and without the ability to ever properly close her mouth. So maybe that's why Patchett forgave this business with the skirt in a way that she may not have been able to if Grealy had been a normal looking person. I don't know. Then again, if she had really forgiven her, she wouldn't have written it, would she? This ugly little scene made me vastly unsympathetic to Grealy and made me thing unflattering thoughts about Patchett as well, for having continued the relationship with Grealy, and for writing about it in this posthumous (for Grealy) way.
I finished the book because I learned so much about an entirely alternate career path. Writers go through a writer's graduate program, and then they apply for grants, fellowships, and invitations to stay for free in artist's colonies of various kinds (including Yaddo, which I was surprised to hear is still going strong, because I've only ever heard of it in connection with Sylvia Plath). These not-insignificant gifts of support then allow the better ones to finish works of fiction,nonfiction or poetry, which then get published in magazines or as books, which then can also lead to various teaching positions, long/short term, permanent and less so. Before the breakthrough for the first fellowship, however, Patchett spends time as a waitress in a family restaurant, dreaming up the plot of her first novel.
Patchett's empathetic descriptions of Grealy's problems eating and talking, the constant search for a way to get teeth, the painful recoveries from the various increasingly invasive sugeries she underwent that mined the rest of her body for what was required for her face had the effect of making Grealy's eventual self destruction and suicide through heroin seem very logical and rational. Is that what Patchett intended?
A very interesting read, though I am not really moved to read any of Patchett's fiction or Grealy's memoir about her face, after this.