I just finished listening to Ann Patchett’s memoir Truth and Beauty. The story focuses on Patchett’s relationship with her best friend, the poet Lucy Grealy, who lost part of her jaw from a Ewing’s sarcoma as a child, and who ultimately died at the age of 39 in 2002. Grealy endured about 40 surgeries over the course of her lifetime, and when she wasn’t in the hospital, she was ambitious and hardworking, garnering many prizes and fellowships and publishing Autobiography of a Face. Truth and Beauty shows Patchett and Grealy to have one of those great best friend kinds of relationships that people are lucky to come by once in a lifetime. However, the book also shows Grealy to have moments where she’s difficult and capricious. She constantly seeks validation, demanding Ann to tell her that she’s her very best friend. Jealous of Ann’s other friendships, she climbs into her lap at dinner and prevents Ann from having conversations with others at the table. She does things that would bug the heck out of me.

I’m sure that Ann would be the first person to admit that she was not a saint, but over the course of the story she continues to show love to Lucy– she nurses her after her surgeries and plays gatekeeper at the hospital. And as Lucy became more and more difficult and self-destructive in the final months of her life, Ann did her best to support Lucy even as she was pushed away.

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My daughter is in a stage when she responds to every frustration by throwing whatever is closest to her across the room. A pillow, a bowl of cereal, the Sunday paper, an iPad, a box of pencils, an ice cream cone– all of those went shooting across the room just today. I have bruises on my arms from where she’s kicked me in the middle of a tantrum, and my husband and I are both exhausted from her wakefulness at night. Many afternoons, she stretches my patience so hard and so thin that I feel I might spend the rest of my life on the verge of snapping at the person who has the misfortune of coming near me.

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My grandmother is eighty-two years old. I remember her best as a woman in her fifties who treated me with sugar cereal when we made the drive from Connecticut to Pittsburgh to visit her. We’d go to the mall and get Orange Julius, and she’d take me to her weekly visits to the beauty parlor, which was right down the street from the shop where I had my first taste of gelato. I’d sit in the front seat of her car and I felt like she talked to me like a grown up instead of a child. She was a young grandma (I was born when she was forty-three), and a beautiful one, who turned heads when we walked together, and I was always proud when people said I looked like her.

But these days, she frets. She anticipates things that could go wrong and runs the scenarios in her head over and over again. My aunt, who lives next door and who looks after her from day to day recently had to bring her to a meeting an hour and a half early because she was so worried that she would be late. She sends my mom on errands that seem nonsensical, running from bank to bank to get her quarters so she can accomplish her quest of getting quarters from all fifty states for each of her eight grandchildren. She’s still a stunner for eighty-two, but in many ways, she barely resembles the sweet, gentle grandma in whom I took refuge when I was a little girl.

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While Truth and Beauty is a fascinating look at the writers’ life, my enduring takeaway of the book is that Patchett continued not just to love Lucy, but to spend time with her and to enjoy that time, even as Lucy got more and more difficult and demanding. We all have people in our lives who can be hard to love at times (I’m sure I’m one of them for some people), and I think that our natural inclination is to distance ourselves from those people. But Patchett shows a constancy in her relationship with Lucy that made me see that I could be a better, more constant, more patient parent and friend to all of the imperfect people in my life (which is everyone).

How do you maintain relationships which can be difficult? I don’t want to suggest that we should force ourselves to put ourselves in the path of people who are truly toxic, but what about the people we love who are merely annoying or tend to do the same stupid things over and over again? 


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