Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo wrote the other evening about reading Ann Patchett's "Truth and Beauty: A Friendship"--- Patchett's account of her friendship with Lucy Grealy. Miss Ginny thought it a beautiful and powerful book, and it is that. I'd read the reviews when the book appeared, but it had seemed too depressing to read. I vaguely knew about Grealy's "Autobiography of a Face" and I knew about how Lucy Grealy's story ended. Miss Ginny wrote that she read it in a single sitting. I read it like that this afternoon. I couldn't stay at work, and I had nowhere to go. I walked home just ahead of the rain and picked up a copy of "Truth and Beauty" at the little downtown library. I sat here in my empty apartment and read it straight through. It's sad and powerful and gentle.

Miss Ginny read it and envied Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy the world of writers and graduate programs in writing--- Yaddo and Iowa and Provincetown, workshops and residence programs and seeing poems and stories placed in little magazines. Writing all day and going out to dive bars to drink 3-for-1 gin-and-tonics. I can imagine it, too. After all, Miss Ginny and I have both been through grad school; it's a world we both know.

I've never been to Yaddo. It's at Saratoga Springs. I don't know New York outside of Manhattan and Long Island. Lissy at emigree used to go to Saratoga Springs with her family for vacations. Miss Ginny and a friend once spent a futile afternoon there trying to find a motel room on a road trip down from Quebec. History doesn't really have workshops, though I spent a couple of summers at Columbia down from Yale for short courses and programs on special topics. I wish I could be back doing colloquia and spending evenings drinking and talking revolutions and ideas and books with classmates in dive bars. I miss that whole sense of possibility in grad school.

The Graduate Center at CUNY had a bar once. Does it still? Yale had the Gypsy, the GPSS bar for grad students. Is it still there? I sat in the courtyard at the Gypsy once in a Hawaiian shirt over a peacoat and drank gin-and-tonics in a snowstorm. One of the people at the table with me got to be ambassador to Albania. I wonder if he remembers it.

Lucy Grealy, with her fierce talent and her ravaged face and the thirty-five operations she'd had to rebuild her jaw--- she'd call Ann Patchett late at night asking if she was loved. She'd panic over whether she'd ever have sex again. I understand both fears. Lucy Grealy could find lovers, could always have friends around her. I'll never have sex again. What's ravaging my face isn't sarcoma, but it's no less lethal. Thirty-five surgeries on her jaw--- skin grafts, bone grafts, her fibula cut away and moved up to replace part of her lower jaw ---and chemotherapy and radiation therapy all through her childhood. Lucy Grealy always saw her life as something that would finally begin once her surgeries were done at last. The painkillers destroyed her in the end--- OxyContin to heroin, dead of an overdose in her thirties. "Truth and Beauty" is a tribute from a friend who loved her deeply and couldn't save her.

Ann Patchett writes about seeing "Orpheus" with Lucy, about Lucy laughingly telling her that she didn't want the handsome Orpheus. She wanted the actor who played Death. Wanted to kiss him there in his limousine. Why not? Sarcoma, chemotherapy, thirty-five surgeries: she was invincible, she knew how to kiss Death.

I remember Peter Beagle's pretty little short story "Come, Lady Death"--- Death as the waif-like late-Georgian belle, dancing there in a Regency ballroom with the fortyish hussar captain who was the only man there who'd ask her to dance. Silly, pretty, melancholy little story. Romantic in just the way that always catches me.

Lucy Grealy tells Ann Patchett on the phone one night when Patchett is alone and miserable on a winter's night at an Iowa workshop to just march down the residence hall knocking on doors 'til someone will join her for a drink. I could never do that. I'm no good at talking to strangers, no good at being sociable. Patchett and Grealy spend twenty years or so on the phone talking, offering up reassurances and love and support and Stories. It's different if you're male, of course--- you're not really allowed to have close friends. Miss Ginny always has her Russian bars to go to. And friends who come into town or with whom she can take trips. I can't walk back downtown or drive to the university. Not alone, certainly. A week ago there was a Voice on the aether that I did look forward to every night. I'll never hear that Voice again. I'm no one who'd ever be part of a friendship anyone would remember, let alone write about.

I want to tell Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo how much I did love "Truth and Beauty". A book I will thank her for. And I want to tell her how much I agree with her about the world Patchett and Grealy lived inside--- how much it's the world I miss, and the world Miss Ginny and I do fit into.