Reading and Writing to Find Out Who We Are and What We Think
July 7, 2009 at 7:27 am
· Filed under 1
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
Permalink
Create a free edublog to get your own comment avatar (and more!)
tianm wrote @ September 1st, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Hey Mr. Kreinbring sorry for having these sent so late. I didnt know that the site was not going to be up. I just wanted to tell you that i did read the book and here are my blogs.
~ Torri Mathes
1) My first thoughts on the books was that is was going to be very similar to the first book, “Autobiography of a Face” by Lucy Grealy. I quickly came to realize that it was not. “Truth and Beauty” by Ann Patchett, is a more describtive book about two friends and both of their stories. Not just one. I like this a lot because you get to hear both sides of each persons life, what they were going through on the inside, and what another person thought on the outside.
2) “The question was never whether or not Lucy wanted the man, thequwstion was only whether or not the man wanted her.” (Patchett 40)
This quote reminds me of when Lucy and Ann were in Aberdeen and they went to see a pyche. The woman told Lucy that she would never find love ever, but i disagree. Lucy did have love, her love was Ann. It may have not been the kind of love Lucy wanted, but she did have it.
3) I noticed that through out the book, Lucy tends to act very child-like. On page 85, Lucy had came to stay with Ann for a couple of weeks. Lucy made a mess in her apartment. Lucy left bowls of food laying around, towels under pillows, and Anns’ clothes everywhere.
I feel she acted this way because she didnt get to enjoy her childhood like everyone else did. Instead, she was in the hospital for chemotherapy or in bed because she was too sick to go to school.
4) On page 108, Ann tells Lucy that she is dating a poet and Lucy isnt very happy with this. To Lucy, I think that she is feeling a little bit of betrayal and jealousy. Betrayal, because she is a very needy person and Ann is her best friend. I also think that Lucy feels that Ann isnt going to love her as much because she has a boyfriend. Jealousy because Lucy hasnt been able to find a boyfriend or even connect with someone like Ann has.
5) “Lucy’s loneliness was breathtaking in its enormity. if she emptied out Grand Central Station and filled it with the people she knew well, the people who loved her, there would be more than a hundred people there….” (Patchett 171)
At this point, this is when i think Lucy went into depression. She started to do heroin and distancing herself from everyone. This quote shows how Lucy never realized how many people really cared for her and loved her.
6) “She believed that the most basic rules of life did not apply to her, and over the course of our friendship, without me knowing when it happened, I had come to believe it myself. The sheer force of Lucy’s life convinced me that she would live no matter what. That was my mistake.” (Patchett 257)
This quote proves that to everyone, Lucy was untouchable. She was the joy and hope to everyone, especially Ann.
hetal p wrote @ September 3rd, 2009 at 8:03 am
“In our friendship I had spent a lot of time telling Lucy to pull herself up, to get over the past and move on” (Patchett 208).
Lucy needs to get over the fact that the face will be the way it’s always been. That’s the major issue in her life that stops her from doing what she wants. That’s the case with many people in the world today. They only focus on one tiny aspect on themselves and they believe I it were better or it wasn’t there, there life would be complete. Lucy believes her life would be perfect. If no one can get on with that tiny thing that stops their life they’re never going to reach anything. They will be stuck in the same spot for the rest of their lives.
hetal p wrote @ September 3rd, 2009 at 8:04 am
“The sheer force of Lucy’s life convinced me that she would live no matter what. That was my mistake” (Patchett 257).
It is not really Ann’s fault that Lucy died. It’s not anyone’s fault. Lucy survived through cancer and 38 surgeries. She had friends who tried to help her as best as they could. Lucy died because it was her time to die. I believe that people die according to their fate.
hetal p wrote @ September 3rd, 2009 at 8:06 am
Mr.Kreinbring my other blogs are also on the other blog page.
Hetal Patel
“We knew things about Lucy the way one knows about the private lives of movie stars, by a kind of osmosis of information.”(Patchett 3).
You know those couple of people in high school that everyone wishes they could be like, because it appears that their lives are so much better than ours? So we build them up in our minds, to be almost god like. Well, Lucy was just that kind of person. Everyone knew who she was, because she had an exceptionally better life story than most of them. She had beaten death numerous times and people thought that she was so brave. Although she didn’t know who they were, they all knew who she was. I’m guessing that Lucy was annoyed yet flattered at times about this. After all its not like she was a celebrity. She was just a girl who had been dealt a bad hand in life. After reading Lucy’s story, it’s obvious that she didn’t live a charmed life.
Sorry this quote is so late, I was fixing this one, and I lost track of time when I left for South America. All of the other ones are finished.
Sorry my computer was not working at all this summer.
Quote- “And of course, I realized that Lucy had never disliked me in college. She simply had no idea who I was”(Patchett 48)
I chose this quote because there are some kids in the world who don’t know people for who they are, they only know what they look like. Lucy only knew people who were nice to her; she never knew what kind of person they were. In high school there are always young teenagers who know people for how smart they are or for how nice they are, but they never get to know that person. Teenagers just look at each other and judge, but they don’t really know who they are unless they give everyone a chance to get to know the other person. Ann and Lucy gave each other the chance to talk and find out what the other person is like. They gave each other a chance to be friends, and now they are.
I agree with Hetal. Lucy needs to get over her past. The only way she can move on with her life is to accept the past for what it is. She needs to accept that she had cancer and that she had therapy that was hard and that is made her body different from others. Lucy can never have the future that she wants if she can never get over her past. She can never be the perfect person she wants to be if she has her past haunting her everyday.
Quote-“Lucy has white Irish skin and dark blond hair and in the end that’s what you saw, the things that didn’t change: her eyes, the sweetness of her little ears”(Patchett 12).
Ann was the one of the only people who saw Lucy for who she is. She did not look at her face and judge her based on that, Ann looked beyond that and judge Lucy based on the personality she had. Ann saw Lucy for who she was and she saw the things that did not change her. The young adults in Lucy’s life only saw the things that did changed Lucy, like her face. They would only look at her on how she was different, because she had a different face from everyone else. They never did see the things that did not change Lucy, the things that Ann saw.
Quote-“You’ll never have children and you’ll always be alone’”(Patchett 47).
Lucy always knew that she was always going to be alone and that she will never be loved. She knew that she was going to be unhappy with her life, but once she had the fortune read, it was confirmed for her. She thought it was a lie she was telling herself but once it was told to her by another person, it destroyed her. She was devastated when that happened. She thought she could be happy but now the future was told to her by a fortune teller.
Quote-“I started to cry because I had just begun the second half of my life, the half that would be lived without Lucy”(Patchett 252).
Ann has continued her life, and she has continued it without Lucy. She always had Lucy in her life for a very long time and now she is gone. Ann does not know what to do with her life without her; she always felt that Lucy was an important part of her life. Now her best friend is gone and she does not know what to do. They both have continued life without each other and it is difficult for both of them to not have each other in their every day life. They have started a new chapter in their life without their best friend.
HTML-Tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
