Nice work on Truth and Beauty and Autobiography of a Face
Most of you seemed to have honed in on the thematic elements that Patchett and Greely are working to impart. I see that some of the conversation has drifted towards the idea of knowing who Lucy is. Someone said that just because we know her story doesn’t mean that we know her. That set me to thinking about how we know one another, and the way that I see it we do know someone when we know her story. What are we but a collection of stories? Think about it. What binds us to our friends, to the people that we think we know is a common story. I can tell someone I just met who I am, father, teacher, husband, coach, dude, but what do any of those titles mean without a stories to fill them in? Many of you are soon going to be working on your college applications and coming to realize that based simply on your resumes you’re not unique. Out of the 100,000 or so applications that will overflow mailbags at the University of Michigan how will you stand out? Every one of those applications is trying to tell a story about the person who filled it out. All of those hopefuls will have high G.P.A’s, long lists of involvement and community service, and stacks of laudatory recommendation letters but none of that will ever tell a story about a person worth knowing. How will you tell a story that shows your beauty?
Lucy Greely doesn’t want people to know her as “cancer girl” because she’s more than that. Her difficulty lies in that people think they know her by her scars. What is missing from her face is how people define her and because that injury is so prominent she has to go to extreme measures to get herself and other people past it. On the cover of her book is the picture of the little girl, I think it’s Lucy, covering her face with a scrap of cellophane. It obscures her and blurs the scar but it also separates her from a world she wants to know and wants to know her. The book tells the story from behind the cellophane. Patchett’s tells the story from the front of the cellophane, our side. This perspective affects the writing.
Truth and Beauty is an incredibly ambitious title for a book but it’s exactly what both authors-all people really-are trying to accomplish. In writing this book Patchett is caught between writing about Lucy’s truth, the promiscuity, drug use, her manipulative and desperately needy side, and her beauty, her writing, bravery, friendship. As you know, Patchett took quite a bit of criticism from readers, and some of the Greely family, who saw her portrayal as a glorification of Lucy’s struggles but I don’t know how else she could have written the story without presenting the truth of Lucy Greely.
When it comes right down to it, it’s not our beauty that connects us and makes us love each other. It’s our scars, our struggles and how we write our stories. Because of her dedication to the hard truth, some of it ugly, Patchett’s readers get to know Lucy’s beauty.
Peace,
RK
