The writer of Bel Canto — winner from the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Orange Prize and long-running New York Times bestseller — turns to non-fiction within a moving chronicle of her decades-long friendship with the critically acclaimed and recently deceased author, Lucy Grealy.

What goes on when the individual who is your loved ones is someone you are not bound to by bloodstream? What goes on when that person is not your lover, but your best friend? In her frank and startlingly seductive first function of nonfiction, Truth about Truth & Beauty & Beauty, Ann Patchett shines light for the little-explored globe of women’s friendships and displays us what it means to stand jointly.

Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy met in university in 1981, and after searching for the Iowa Writer’s Workshop began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work. In her critically acclaimed memoir, Autobiography of the Encounter, Lucy Grealy composed about the 1st half of her life. IN REALITY & Beauty, the storyplot isn’t Lucy’s lifestyle or Ann’s life but the parts of their lives they distributed together. This is a family portrait of unwavering dedication that spans twenty years, from the lengthy cold winters of the Midwest to medical wards to publication parties in New York. Through love, popularity, medications and despair, this is exactly what this means to participate two lives that are intertwined.

This is a tender, brutal book about caring the person we cannot save. It is about devotion and about being lifted up by the pure effervescence of somebody who knew how exactly to live life to the fullest.