The books I've been reading are the same: they make me feel heavy and slow and a little dim-witted. So I'm going back to two books read last year at the recommendation of my friend Barbara Jourdonnais: Autobiography of a Face and Truth & Beauty.
To read these together is like having two mirrors side by side, each showing a different reflection. Ann Patchett carefully chooses her words and they are beautiful, inevitable, and rock solid. She writes, "When I was young and decided to be a writer, my understanding of the job description came straight from La Boheme. There would be a drafty garret, cold nights, little food, a single candle."
Then there's Lucy Grealy, who has undergone repeated surgeries on her face since the age of nine due to a rare form of cancer that causes her jaw to disintegrate. Lucy writes, "Though our whole family shared the burden of my mother's anger, in my heart I suspected that part of it was my fault and my fault alone. Cancer is an obscenely expensive illness; I saw the bills, I heard their fights. There was no doubt that I was personally responsible for a great deal of my family's money problems; ergo, I was responsible for my mother's unhappy life."
Ann and Lucy meet when they share an apartment while attending the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Ann's book is mostly about Lucy and Lucy's book is entirely about Lucy. Ann's version is full, an epic novel of a true story. Lucy's version is one-dimensional, painful, short. To read them one after the other is to see how far we are from each other, how some gulfs cannot be crossed.
Ann's writing is like flying -- you get to lift above and see the whole countryside. Lucy's writing is quick and clever but there's a lack, a hurriedness. That feels uncharitable but to look at the path of Lucy's life is to wonder how she wrote at all. And to wonder what she'd have written if her face and her heart had been left intact.
copyright 2009 Ann Krueger Spivack
