lunes, 9 de septiembre de 2013
Truth And Beauty, Ann Patchett
Amy's Comments on Whole Book
I really liked Truth and Beauty. Reading it, I learned more about memoir, in some fundamental ways. I am again struck by how critical it is to have a fairly narrow story to tell, and to tell that one story in great detail. Here it is the story of Ann and Lucy’s friendship, their personal struggles, and pursuit of writing careers. That sounds so blah when I read it, but it became excellent, mostly in the middle of the book.
We hear very early on that the main theme of the book will be the development of a character, Lucy Grearly, and that the supporting character will be Ann. While she is the narrator, she still seems to take the back seat. In the second paragraph of the book Ann says, “I was looking for two apartments then, one for myself and one for Lucy, Grealy, who I had gone to college with.” And then we meet the central character. The thesis is, the chronicling of a 20-year friendship between the whimsical, wounded, and talented Lucy Grealy, and Ann the stable, maybe perfectionist, reliable tortoise. I loved Lucy, or LOO-cee, as she is called by the fifth page, as soon as she began to unpack her. Ann’s development of this one character is spectacular. In fact it is sort of the whole book. I really do feel like I sort of spent my life with her after reading about her decisions and motivations as told through Ann’s eyes. It invited me to think carefully about who I am closely doing life with and if I am paying careful enough attention to write a story about her or him, about us over time.
One of the questions that emerged for me is if they ever had a sexual relationship. She says, many times, “we kissed.” But you don’t get the feeling that it ever crossed the line.
She uses a very interesting technique to allow us to hear Loo-cee’s voice directly—which is Lucy’s letters to Ann.
I think the title came from this line “She could talk on the nature of truth and beauty for hours.”
I couldn’t help but enneagram type the characters, early on I thought Loo-cee was a four and Ann a one. I love the description of them as the grasshopper and the hare,
Friendship
“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 youas she recited her Keats over breakfast, was better than food any day.” 19.
“I left the house where I lived with someone who loved me to go to the house of someone who did not love me at all.” That was a sad but crystal clear true kind of line.
Friendship, “She was crying and crying and I picked her up in my arms and she wrapped her legs around my waist and we stood there at the arrival gate for a long time, crying together.”
Beautiful description of friendship, “We were better off when we were together. Together we were a small society of ambition and high ideals. We were tender and patient and kind. We were not like the world at all.” 73
We’re thirty-seven years old. We’re too old for this.”206
“Even when Lucy was devastated or difficult, she was the person I knew best in the world, the person I was the most comfortable with. 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.” 215
“I was walking into a party of lovely strangers. Lucy and I were one another’s history. I would see her thorough her quest for teeth and she would tell me when I was about to embarrass myself. What constituted family if not that?”
Writing
The book had a lot of great lines about writing, “If I imagine the artists in Paris, I do not see them dusting. I believe they were probably too engaged in the creative process to wrestle with such lowly concepts as coat hangers.” Pg 23.
“We both approached writing much the same way we approached going to the gym in those days: with the belief that regular attendance was more than half the battle. Lucy knew that she could write a novel if she just kept showing up and getting in a few pages a day.”
Lucy and I had ceased to be distinguishable from everyone else and every day the ground was getting softer, swallowing us up a little bit more. We had each come to realize that no one was going to save our lives, and that if we wanted to save them ourselves; we only had one skill that afforded us any hope at all. 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. 62
“I was starting to wonder if I was ready to be a writer, not someone who won prizes, got published, and was given the time and space to work, but someone who wrote as a course of life.”
“They were both extremely smart, serious readers, great conversationalist, who wanted more than anything to leave their desks and find a party. They each had countless friends from every period of their lives and they like to brag about their connections.”
I had done the thing I had always wanted to do: I had written a book, all the way to the end. Even if proved to be terrible. It was mine.” 86
Her intellect and ability were in every sense larger than the disease.”141
“Her writing was gorgeous. She could write a novel as long as she could find a way to stay in the chair.” 168
Depression
“The damage to her face was a fact, but over the years she had cemented that fact to the idea that she was unlovable. 42 (Sadness). Loneliness, grief, addiction. Are all memoirs about difficult topics and overcoming them? Is this what men write about too?
“They would get this business of her face finished up once and for all and then life, real life, would begin. Lucy had felt she had been on the verge of real life several times before, a life with the finished face she would have to learn to live with , but it had never quite happened. There was always one more surgery that was holding her back. This time it was going to be different….She would have friends and fall in love and go dancing every night.” 85.
Insecurity, “Do you love me more?” 106
Lingering Questions:
1) Should I read Autobiography of a face?
2) Are there parts of the book that are genuinely about Ann? Like when she is a waitress and the sweet friends she has there, her accomplishments, her failed marriage, Karl. (Yes, I think there are, I think she stands on her own.)
3) How did this structure of time and place help the book flow?
The book is written in a few concrete places at a few concrete periods of time. At Iowa when they were 22, in Scottland when Loo-cee was getting surgeries, in Provincetown when they had their fellowships, in and out of NY, in Nashville. Where will I place my memoir?
4) Do all memoirs have three acts?
I think I said this somewhere else, but the begging didn’t grab me, and while the end could have dragged with her immanent suicide, it didn’t, she was quick about it, and the actual death page was not sentimental. The book sung in the middle for me.
I loved the section where Ann went with Lucy to get an Abortion and how differently it was understood in that period of time.
Why didn’t she include B—‘s full name?
Began at 22 ended at 40.
- 1) Character development
- 2) Inclusion of faith, sex, and fiction.
- 3) Interesting truths—“Lucy always said it was better when people just came out and asked her what had happened.”
- 4) Format—Inclusion of letters to allow character to speak for her self.
- 5) All good memoirs include references to fiction
- 6) Talk from different references in time. They are written at a specific point in time and sometimes over time so the characters can evolve.
- 7) Really funny cultural references to Kathleen Turner and Jane Fonda.
- 8) Do all books have a driving tension or wrinkle that needs to get worked out.
Suscribirse a:
Entradas (Atom)