Truth & Beauty Audiobook (Free)

The author of Bel Canto — winner from the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Orange Prize and long-running New York Times bestseller — turns to nonfiction inside a moving chronicle of her decades-long friendship using the critically acclaimed and recently deceased author, Lucy Grealy.

What happens when the individual who is your family is someone you aren’t bound to by blood? What happens when see your face is not your lover, but your closest friend? In her frank and startlingly personal first work of nonfiction, Truth about Truth & Beauty & Beauty, Ann Patchett shines light within the little-explored world of women’s friendships and shows us what it means to stand collectively.

Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and after enrolling in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work. In her critically acclaimed memoir, Autobiography of the Encounter, Lucy Grealy wrote about the first fifty percent of her lifestyle. In Truth & Beauty, the storyplot isn’t Lucy’s existence or Ann’s existence but the elements of their lives they shared together. This is a family portrait of unwavering dedication that spans twenty years, from the lengthy cold winters from the Midwest to surgical wards to book parties in NY. Through love, popularity, medications and despair, this is exactly what it means to participate two lives that are intertwined.

This is a tender, brutal book about adoring the person we can not save. It is about devotion and about being lifted up from the sheer effervescence of someone who knew how exactly to live life to the fullest.