{"id":27642,"date":"2017-10-26T00:01:05","date_gmt":"2017-10-26T07:01:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/69.195.124.125\/~barbass7\/bfn\/?p=27642"},"modified":"2017-10-26T00:01:05","modified_gmt":"2017-10-26T07:01:05","slug":"patchett","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/patchett\/","title":{"rendered":"Ann Patchett — My Brand-New Favorite Author"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Two flowers, one thriving, one not remind me of Ann Patchett and her friend Lucy. Photo by Barbara Newhall<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By Barbara Falconer Newhall<\/em><\/p>\n

I’ve got a new favorite author. Ann Patchett. Step aside Marilynne Robinson and Annie Dillard, Leo Tolstoy and Richard Ford. You, too, Philip Roth and Karen Armstrong.<\/p>\n

I’ve just finished Ann Patchett’s searing 2005 memoir “Truth and Beauty” about Patchett’s deep and painful friendship with Lucy Grealy, the author of “Autobiography of a Face.” I want more, more, more of Patchett. She’s an astute author, who, I suspect, if I could meet her in person, would be a kindred spirit.<\/p>\n

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A detail of the cover of Ann Patchett’s audio book “Truth and Beauty.”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I had a feeling about Patchett a few months ago after I finished her 2013 memoir\u00a0This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage.<\/a>\u00a0It’s\u00a0 a book about an actually happy marriage and life.\u00a0Really — Patchett achieves the impossible in this book, and that is (if you can believe most every creative writing book ever written) she writes a story that is short on tension.<\/p>\n

Patchett — Contented Memoirist<\/strong><\/h5>\n

It’s the story of a person, Patchett, who is actually content with herself at the get-go. No childhood abuse. No struggles with addiction, no life threatening illness, no poverty. Just a Catholic school girl who manages to find her way into a successful life as a wife, bookstore owner<\/a>, friend of many, and author of such best-sellers as “Commonwealth” and “Bel Canto.”<\/p>\n

Maybe you have read Lucy Grealy’s\u00a0 memoir, “Autobiography of a Face.”<\/a> I haven’t, though I’ve intended to ever since it came out in 1994. It describes Grealy’s struggles with identity and a face partially disfigured by cancer as an adolescent.<\/p>\n

Patchett and Grealy were contemporaries at Sarah Lawrence College and went on to become roommates at the\u00a0Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A profoundly emotional intellectual friendship ensued, which persisted during the two women’s slow, then sudden, rise to publication and critical success.<\/p>\n

The charm, and ultimately the pain, of their friendship lies in Grealy’s outrageous, in-your-face\u00a0 personality thrown up against Patchett’s thoughtful, straight-arrow, Southern restraint.<\/p>\n

Life Without Lucy Grealy<\/strong><\/h5>\n

The friendship ends tragically when Grealy’s dies at age 39 of a probable heroin overdose and Pachett is left to lead the rest of her life in the company of family and friends — but without her “Pettest Pet,” her soulmate Lucy.<\/p>\n

Patchett is a consummate storyteller. Her economical, unstinting, often droll writing is as good as it as it gets. As a reader I’m going to be grateful for these two wonderful reads. As a writer, I plan to study them to figure out how the heck she does it.<\/p>\n

If you’re a recorded book reader, btw, add Pachett’s reading of “Truth and Beauty” and “This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage,” to your must-listen list.<\/p>\n

Full disclosure: One of Lucy Grealy’s sisters was not at all happy with Patchett’s book and her portrayal of Lucy. Here’s what she had to say.<\/a>\u00a0Writing memoir is risky business, which is why, maybe, the novel was invented — to provide a little deniability to everyone involved, writer and writee alike.<\/p>\n

More thoughts on books at\u00a0<\/em>“Jesus Was a Loser. Does That Make Trump a Winner?<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0Also at,\u00a0“Do Books Have Rights? This One Didn’t. I Threw It in the Tr<\/a><\/em>ash.”<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"detail<\/a><\/p>\n

I’ve got a new favorite author. It’s Ann Patchett. Step aside Marilynne Robinson and Annie Dillard, Leo Tolstoy and Richard Ford. You, too, Philip Roth. Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":27643,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[70],"tags":[2026,134,34,2027,2028,69],"class_list":["post-27642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-openers","tag-ann-patchett","tag-books","tag-dont-miss","tag-lucy-grealy","tag-memoirs","tag-writing-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27642\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}