Never before have I read two memoirs that seemed to go so well together, two books that tell the same story with different voices and different perspectives.
The book Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy came out in 1994. As a young girl, poet Lucy Grealy had a large portion of her jaw removed due to Ewing’s sarcoma. Her autobiography covers her childhood hardships, college experiences as Sarah Lawrence College, her beginnings as a poet and her time at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop where she lived with poet Ann Patchett. Grealy's book experienced great success in the 1990s. Unfortunately, various reconstructive surgeries led to addictions which led to Grealy's death by overdose in 2002.
The book Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett came out in 2004, two years after Grealy's death, and looks at the challenges and qualities of their friendship from Patchett's point of view.
Read the Grealy book first, then dive into Patchett's take. Or for more information on how the two books play together, read a review by Joyce Carol Oats from The New York Times Review of Books.
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