What happens when the person who is your family is someone you aren't bound to by blood? What happens when the person you promise to love and to honor for the rest of your life is not your lover, but your best friend? In Truth & Beauty, her frank and startlingly intimate first work of nonfiction, Ann Patchett shines a fresh, revealing light on the world of women's friendships and shows us what it means to stand together.


Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and, after enrolling in the Iowa Writers' Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work was. In her critically acclaimed and hugely successful memoir, Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy wrote about losing part of her jaw to childhood cancer, the years of chemotherapy and radiation, and then the endless reconstructive surgeries. In Truth & Beauty, the story isn't Lucy's life or Ann's life, but the parts of their lives they shared. This is a portrait of unwavering commitment that spans twenty years, from the long, cold winters of the Midwest, to surgical wards, to book parties in New York. Through love, fame, drugs, and despair, this book shows us what it means to be part of two lives that are intertwined.

This is a tender, brutal book about loving a person we cannot save. It is about loyalty, and about being lifted up by the sheer effervescence of someone who knew how to live life to the fullest.

A Freshman Common Read at Miami University (with Autobiography of a Face), Clemson College

• We started tracking this book on July 20, 2011.
• This book was $3.99 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 189 times in the past 5,232 days.
• The current price of this book is $10.99 last checked 4 hours ago.
• This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past year is $1.99.
• The lowest price to date was $1.99 last reached on October 26, 2025.
• This book has been $1.99 7 times since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was $15.99 last reached on December 1, 2023.
• This book has been $15.99 2 times since we started tracking it.

• Literature & FictionEssays & CorrespondenceEssays

• Publication Date: October 13, 2009
• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 272 Pages
• File Size: 26 KB