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Description edit
Ann Patchett and the late Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and, after enrolling in the Iowa Writer's Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work. In Grealy's critically acclaimed memior, Autobiography of a Face , she wrote about losing part... read more
Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit
Summary edit
I really enjoyed reading T&B. Initially i thought it was a story of a wonderful friendship between two women. The fun and the love for each other wad papable! I even argued the point that Ann understood Lucy so well that she wad entitled to share with the readers Lucy's intimate secrets.... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)
Characters/People edit
Quotes edit
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“I had been raised by Catholic nuns who told us in no uncertain terms that work was the path to God, and that while it was a fine thing to feel loyalty and devotion in your heart, it would be much better for everyone involved if you could find the physical manifestations of your good thoughts and see them put into action. The world is saved through deeds, not prayer, because what is prayer but a kind of worry?”
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“Life really is pretty good most of the time, so long as I remember to keep looking at it that way.”
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“I have never in my life known a writer who enjoyed the actual act of writing less than Lucy, which is saying something because just about every writer I know sits down to work with some degree of dread.”
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“Telling yourself you shouldn't be ashamed of something rarely got anyone anywhere.”
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“Her writing was gorgeous. She could write a novel as long as she could find a way to stay in her chair.”
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“... Lucy had been alone too much of her life, and in her loneliness she had constructed a vision of what a perfect relationship would look like. Love, in her imagination, was so dazzling, so tender and unconditional, that anything human seemed impossibly thin by comparison.”
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“Evan at Sarah Lawrence, a school full of models and actresses and millionaire daughters of industry, everyone knew Lucy and everyone knew her story: she had gad a Ewing's sarcoma at the age of nine, had lived through five years of the most brutal radiation and chemotherapy, and then undergone a series of reconstructive surgeries that were largely unsuccessful. The drama of her life, combined with her reputation for being the smartest student in all of her classes, made her the campus mascot, the favorite pet in her dirty jeans and oversized Irish sweaters.”
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“Tina was good company and I very much wanted her to stay with me, but she was planning on her own adventure, riding her bicycle across America as soon as she dropped me off.”
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“We were younger than any other twenty-two-year-old girls in the world.”
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“We shared our ideas like sweaters, with easy exchange and lack of ownership. We gave over excess words, a single beautiful sentence that had to be cut but perhaps the other would like to have.”
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“That was Lucy's particular genius as well: the ability to take the disparate subjects she read about and find the ways that each one informed the other. I loved to listen to her talk.”
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“Iowa City in the eighties was never going to be Paris in the twenties, but we gave it our best shot.”
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“After a few early discussions it was agreed that my standard of acceptable cleanliness was something she would never be able to comprehend and I was unable to live at the level of squalor in which she seemed quite comfortable. ... The compromise was that I would do all the cleaning and cooking and that neither of us would complain about it, which suited both of us fine.”
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“She had a lack of physical modesty common to many people who had spent that much time naked in hospitals.”
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“"You don't pay off what you borrow. You cut some kind of a deal with them. You tell them what you're going to give them and they take what they can get."”
Lucy -
“I didn't get the envelopes she never opened, or her stories about going up and down the halls at the Plaza Hotel in college and taking food off of room-service trays, a hobby born out of a peculiar sense of down-and-out glamour rather than actual hunger.”
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“Twelve years of Catholic school had taught me that i would be held accountable not only for what I did, but for everything I considered doing. Twelve years of beating cancer had taught Lucy that she was invincible and that nothing, none of it, was ever going to catch up with her. She had a sense of superiority where money was concerned. She believed that not having any had made her worldly and wily, in the same way she believed that coming from the suburbs had branded me forever as naive.”
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“It's got to be every day .. If you doon't turn out pages every day, you're not really a writer. you're just playing at it. You're wasting your time.”
B - -
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That is one thing I’ve learned, that it is possible to really understand things at certain points, and not be able to retain them, to be in utter confusion just a short while later. I used to think that once you really knew a thing, its truth would shine on forever. Now it’s pretty obvious to me that more often than not the batteries fade, and sometimes what you knew even goes out with a bang when you try and call on it, just like a lightbulb cracking off when you throw the switch.
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The world is saved through deeds, not prayer, because what is prayer but a kind of worry? I decided then that my love for Lucy would have to manifest in deeds.
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I couldn’t ever remember being lonely before, certainly not in this way, until I had seen the edge of all the ways you could be with another person, which brought up all the myriad ways that person could never be there for you.
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Grief isn’t something to ‘be gotten through.’ It has no life of its own like that, it’s just plain and simply there. It’s one of the things which tells us we’re human.
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Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn’t even realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.
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Grasshoppers and hares find the ants and tortoises. They need us to survive, but we need them as well. They were the ones who brought the truth and beauty to the party, which Lucy could tell you as she recited her Keats over breakfast, was better than food any day.
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She couldn’t see that no one else was perfect either, and that so much of love was the work of it. She had worked on everything else. Love would have to be charmed.
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But Lucy had been alone too much of her life, and in her loneliness she had constructed a vision of what a perfect relationship would look like. Love, in her imagination, was so dazzling, so tender and unconditional, that anything human seemed impossibly thin by comparison.
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Writing is a job, a talent, but it’s also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon. In her hospital bed or in her lonesome room back at her flat, Lucy brought out the sentences she knew and twisted them into poems and chapters, the same way I stood in the kitchen every night at the end of my shift at Friday’s and rolled 150 silverware packets, dreaming up characters with problems more beautiful and insurmountable than my own.
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“I didn’t remember it,” Lucy said pointedly. “I wrote it. I’m a writer.” This shocked the audience more than her dismissal of illness, but she made her point: she was making art, not documenting an event. That she chose to tell her own extraordinary story was of secondary importance. Her cancer and subsequent suffering had not made this book. She had made it. Her intellect and ability were in every sense larger than the disease.
Highlighted by 17 Kindle customers
First Sentence edit
The thing you can count on in life is that Tennessee will always be scorching hot in August.
Series & Lists edit
This book is in KCPL Discussion Kit (Aug2010). (community list)
Authors & Contributors edit
- Ann Patchett (Author)
First Edition edit
Original Language: English
Publisher: Harpercollins
Country: Add the country of publication.
Publication Date: 2004
ISBN: 0060572140
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harpercollins
Country: Add the country of publication.
Publication Date: 2004
ISBN: 0060572140
Page Count: 272
Awards edit
- Alex Awards (2005)
Classification edit
- Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
- Dewey: 362.196994716092
Subjects edit
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