It took me almost two years to finish Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett.
The dragging and forgetting and abandoning were in no part Ann’s fault. Her words were as consistent as her friendship with her best friend, the late poet and memoirist Lucy Grealy. The flightiness and unpreparedness was, as you may have guessed, mine.
Having finally finished it recently gave me the opportunity to examine not just the contents of the book but also parts of me I was apparently trying to bury.
The book was a parting gift from my ex-boss, after almost 7 years of working together. She told me she chose it because she knew that I’ve read a book of Ann’s (it was Bel Canto) and that it was about friendship.
Truth and Beauty is a powerful dissection of Ann and Lucy’s intertwined lives. It revolves around Ann and Lucy’s 18-year friendship, which began when they were 21-year-old talented writers who met and quickly hit it off at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
In the book, Ann would allude to herself as uninteresting but effective (she liked planning and being conscientious about her life and spending), while Lucy was warm, strong-willed and careless, and popular in their circle (and in America and beyond at one point, thanks to her critically acclaimed memoir Autobiography of a Face which details her life before and after suffering from Ewing’s sarcoma).
It’s also about writing — the doing, the pursuing, the reaping of labor. The lengths one would go to so they can make a living out of the thing they love and know the most. While waitressing in Nashville, after divorcing her first husband and quitting her teaching job, Ann decided she was going to write her first novel.
Writing is a job, a talent, but it’s also a place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.
I knew then, from ingesting that line, that the reason for the sluggishness in my reading pace was not of the need to ponder but rather avoidance.
The book was a gift for when I let go of my dream job. I’ve always wanted to be a writer, an editor. And for seven years, I was. But I left because I craved growth and they couldn’t open a door for me.
“Most days, I feel like I’m a fish out of water,” I told my current boss sometime in January when she asked me how I was faring in the role made especially for me. I’m constantly learning new things and I am very, very grateful.
But reading about Ann and Lucy working towards a life of and making a living off of writing made me finally confront bottled-up feelings. I still get to write at my new job, but I also learn and do so many things that are new to me.
I’ve come to learn that the dream I had when I was young, the one I achieved, was a comfort zone. I’ve been moving away from it, and I often don’t feel like myself because of that. The weight I put on my previous job title and the life that came with it was colossal.
And then the truth: The beauty of living is that you can make choices. (A privileged take, but we’ll allow it here.) So I’ve decided that I’ll continue to write. For me. (For a fee again in the future? We’ll see.) I need to write.
Without writing, I am but a pawn in the game of capitalism. Without writing, I’m just someone who uses her free hours mindlessly scrolling on Tiktok, learning about and discovering things against her will. Without writing, I am not me.
Who am I if not a writer? Unfortunately, not a good friend. (We’ll unpack this some other time. Or never.) Well, at least not as good a friend as Ann was to Lucy. Even when Lucy’s sister Suellen shared her anger at Ann for writing about Lucy just a year and a half after the latter’s death, she still considered Ann “a far better sister to Lucy than [she] could ever have been.”
In fact, Ann felt like a mother to Lucy as I read her recounting of the many times and ways she cared for her. Lucy was needy and Ann was always ready to dote on her. Ann took care of Lucy when she had surgeries (she had a total of 38 in her lifetime, 5 or 6 of them are detailed in the book). Ann paid for the bills Lucy didn’t want to or didn’t have the courage to look at. Ann pushed Lucy to go to rehab when her heroin addiction took over her life.
To wrap up the book, Ann briefly talks about her grief for losing Lucy to a drug overdose.
…now I know I was simply not cut out for life without her. I am living that life now and would not choose it. If Lucy couldn’t give up heroin, I could not give up Lucy.
Unlike Ann’s commitment to Lucy, I was (still am) avoidant and shy. I wanted to be friends with my ex-boss but she was still my boss then, so I tried to keep a safe distance. Close enough that we would always be honest with each other when we needed to be, but I never attempted to be near enough to overstep.
There was a voice call we had, my ex-boss and I, a few years ago. We were discussing targets and plans. At the end of the call, she entrusted me with a piece of her life. I will always cherish that.
***
I learned that the online magazine I (and my ex-boss) worked hard to grow — the one that gave me my dream job; the one I dedicated 7 years of my life to — was shuttering just as I was about to wrap up on Truth and Beauty. It would be a funny coincidence if it weren’t so sad.