The Grasshopper and the Ant

I expect many readers have heard of and/or read Ann Patchett, but how many have heard of Lucy Grealy? I had not. Grealy wrote a well-received memoir, Autobiography of a Face, but only one, and she died young, which is part of the reason for her lesser fame. It turns out that Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy were close, a friendship Patchett described in her first work of nonfiction, Truth and Beauty, published in 2004.

Patchett and Grealy first met at Sarah Lawrence College just north of New York City. ‘Met’ is perhaps the wrong word: Grealy was well-known, and Patchett by her own description was not.

I knew her and she did not know me.

Grealy’s fame was partly due to her brutal backstory: she had Ewing’s sarcoma at a young age, 5 years of chemotherapy and radiation, and then a series of miserably painful surgeries to reconstruct her lower jaw, permanently damaged by the treatment. But there was more to Lucy Grealy than her medical treatment: she was reputed to be a very talented poet. Her facial afflictions could have made her shy, but she threw herself into life.

In contrast, Patchett had spent her fairly placid childhood in Catholic school, and in this memoir, she comes across as quiet, reliable and conventional.

Post-college, their relationship really began when both women were accepted to the Iowa Writers Workshop. Neither had much money, so they shared a cheap apartment in Iowa City. When Patchett arrived:

[Grealy] shot through the door with a howl. In a second she was in my arms, leaping up onto me, her arms locked around my neck, her legs wrapped around my waist, ninety-five pounds that felt no more than thirty. She was crying into my hair.

A startling reaction, for sure, (especially given that they had not been close friends in college) and perhaps the first indication of Lucy’s intensity and the oddity of the relationship.

The women bonded through their time in Iowa, and their lives remained interlinked as they struggled through the early years of ambition and failure. Patchett intersperses the memoir with the prolific letters that Grealy wrote to her over the years, in which she calls Patchett by a wild collection of rather charming names.

Dearest Axiom of Faith

Dearest Pet

my little lamp on the wharf

Dear Angora

The letters are quite remarkable. Some describe medical procedures with not an ounce of self-pity.

I got out of the hospital yesterday and look like I’ve had a good right cross to the chin and lip. I had some fat from my hip grafted into my lower lip, so now I’ve got what will hopefully be a bridget bardot lip, though it’s doubtful whether it will last more than a few months [..] It makes a difference: I can close my mouth now and can kiss.

Others show Lucy’s self-awareness about her life:

[after a session with a shrink] I’ve never noted the significance of the fact that 90% of the men I’ve slept with, I’ve slept with almost immediately, and then gone on to become friends with them rather than allowing it to progress the other way.

Patchett saved all Lucy’s letters, and the published letters are all from Lucy, which seems unbalanced. I wondered what Patchett wrote back. Were her letters also open and vulnerable? Unfortunately, none of them are included, perhaps because Lucy did not save any, or perhaps by Patchett’s choice.

Patchett’s descriptions of the process of writing were fascinating. There are a host of fellowships for authors, or aspiring authors, that can make the difference between success and poverty (or so those awarding the fellowships hope). These fellowships provide quiet places to stay, work and meet other authors, and enough money that the authors need not exhaust themselves with tedious jobs that leave them too tired or with not enough time to write. In return, the authors sometimes have to give a talk or two, or meet with students a few times. Patchett and Grealy imagined they would win such fellowships and spend months together in pleasant places. In fact, both of them did eventually get these awards, but never at the same time.

We won the same things, but our good luck was always slightly out of sync. I was a finalist for the Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe while she was on the waiting list at Provincetown. Two years after Lucy had her Bunting year, I had mine. Two year after I was a fellow at Provincetown, Lucy got to go as well.

A joint book party in New York captures their relative status in the mid-1990s: Lucy’s Autobiography of a Face had made her famous while Ann’s Taft came out to considerably less excitement.

The comparative silence surrounding Taft made it clear that it was going to sink without a trace. It had an awful title (my fault) and an awful cover (the publisher’s fault) and despite getting the best reviews I’d had, it did not seem to be selling outside my immediate family.

At the joint book launch, Lucy signed ‘seemingly endless numbers of books’ while Ann ‘signed a handful’.

Patchett describes the relationship almost as an uninterested observer, and this is perhaps a problem with the book. From the first, Lucy is needy and demanding and possessive, while Patchett is calm and supportive. It’s difficult to see exactly why Patchett is so devoted to Lucy. Patchett, it almost seems, needs desperately to be needed, and so puts up with all Lucy’s oddities, such as when Lucy sits in her lap at restaurants and demands to be told she is loved. Patchett finds this mildly embarrassing at times, but seems to accept it. To the reader, it is not a healthy relationship, and their co-dependency is not a comfortable thing to read about.

Many further surgeries left Lucy addicted to painkillers, and eventually heroin. At some point, Patchett makes it clear, she had had enough of Lucy’s endless demands and chooses to become less available. The book ends on a tragic note when Lucy dies of an overdose. Suicide? Unclear.

While Patchett’s writing is always pleasant to read, deceptively simple while carefully crafted, and often insightful, her intense involvement in the relationship means that the novel shows both too much and too little understanding of exactly what that relationship was, since the author has no distance from the events. So in the end, I learned about Lucy Grealy, (and I want to read her own book), but this was not, as it is described in blurbs, a story of a female friendship — it was the story of a very odd relationship.

It is also unclear what everyone else thought of Lucy. As per this novel, she was wildly popular, had hosts of friends who would sit by her side through many hospital nights, and had many boyfriends and lovers. Lucy’s charm, though, remains hidden to the reader: she comes across as narcissistic and insecure. Patchett sees it otherwise.

We were a pairing out of an Aesop’s fable, the grasshopper and the ant, the tortoise and the hare. And sure, maybe the ant was warmer in the winter and the tortoise won the race, but everyone knows that the grasshopper and the hare were infinitely more appealing animals in all their leggy beauty, their music and interesting side trips.

---

Truth and Beauty [a friendship]

Ann Patchett

Harper Collins, 2004.