The Unexpected Afterlife of Autobiography of a Face

The bulk of Grealy’s book concerns her childhood: her repetitive
surgeries, her burgeoning self-consciousness, her adolescent loneliness. The
final chapter rushes through her college and graduate school years—glossing
over her sudden popularity and her discovery of her own writing talent, as
though any admission of happiness or success might discredit her prior
suffering. On page 189, she’s a bullied high school student; on page 203, she
is dancing at gay clubs and partying with Andy Warhol. How?

In Truth & Beauty, the novelist Ann Patchett—her close
friend of two decades—picks up the story where Grealy left off. Autobiography
of a Face was published when Grealy was 31, and it brought her the
literary fame she had longed for in her twenties. Truth & Beauty came
out 10 years later—shortly after Grealy died of a heroin overdose. 

Patchett and Grealy were classmates at Sarah Lawrence, but barely knew
each other: Grealy was a campus celebrity, while Patchett—in her own telling,
at least—had “a tendency to blur into other people.” But they wound up living
together at the Iowa Writers Workshop, where Grealy studied poetry and Patchett
wrote fiction, and quickly became inseparable—dancing, drinking, reading,
sharing art and ideas until the boundaries between them collapsed. “We didn’t
so much discuss our work as volley ideas back and forth until neither of us was
sure who belonged to what,” Patchett writes. Separated after Iowa by postgrad
jobs and Lucy’s sporadic hospital stays, they kept in touch with frequent phone
calls, cross-continental visits, and long, extravagant letters, some of which
are reprinted in Truth & Beauty. Ann calls Lucy her “pet,” and Lucy
addresses Ann as “my little lamp on the wharf,” “my most loved hero,” “my self
winding watch, my showpiece, my shoelace.” (There’s a writerly
self-consciousness to the letters, as if both women hope they might one day be
published.)