Truth & Beauty is award-winning writer Ann Patchett's memoir of her 20-plus-year-friendship with memoirist and poet Lucy Grealy - a celebrated writer in her own right, best known for her memoir Autobiography of a Face.

Grealy's book told her moving story of suffering jaw cancer as a little girl, and the years of brutal chemotherapy and radiation, reconstructive surgeries and facial deformities that haunted her until her death from a drug overdose at 39.

To read Patchett's new book is to get the backstory of Grealy's trials. While Autobiography of a Face is a testament to pure, unbridled talent - Grealy was a respected poet before her autobiography made her a celebrated author - Truth & Beauty exhibits the dysfunction, despair and often illogical aspects of Grealy and the two women's alliance.

Patchett paints Grealy as one who seems doomed in her every choice. This calls into question the healthiness of a friendship that appears to thrive largely because one needs the other badly - and the other needs to be needed badly. While a common dynamic, it's a sad glue nonetheless.

Patchett is an adept storyteller, expertly recounting when she and Grealy met in college and later attended graduate school at the Iowa Writers Workshop. This writerly setting launched a communion between the two that took them through various successes in their writing careers: fellowships at Radcliffe College; residencies at Yaddo, the artists' community; and publishing contracts.

They had a lot going for them. Yet, for Grealy, it was never enough. Patchett lays bare her friend's brokenness, showcasing a damaged character that - facial disfigurement or no - seems visceral, unwavering and inevitable for Grealy.

Grealy lacked discipline, financial responsibility and self-esteem. She lived for fast and furious pleasure - whether that was sex, alcohol, drugs or the high of publishing success. That Grealy faced unfathomable facial disfigurement seems after-the-fact to understanding her core.

Consider this passage, in which Grealy learns of Patchett's new poet boyfriend:

Grealy: "Do you like his poetry better than mine?"

Patchett: "I've only read a few of his poems."

"So you think he's better."

"Of course I don't think he's better. I think you're better."

"Do you love me more?"

"Of course I love you more . . . you win, hands down . . ."

Grealy closes this emotional volley with, "'I love you too," - but "she said it in a wretched voice," writes Patchett.

Such is the sad and aching rhythm of their union. To Patchett's credit, she fully admits that Grealy's works were often superior to her own. She lovingly tells of a joint reading the two delivered, where she hurriedly read and sat down so that the audience could receive what they truly came for: Grealy.

And Patchett tells of Grealy's popularity in undergraduate school, where she was a regular and loved announcer at film screenings.

This wants to be a book that serves as an example of friendship and loyalty at its best. As the book's jacket attests, "It (Truth & Beauty) is about loyalty and about being lifted up by the sheer effervescence of someone who knew how to live life to the fullest."

In exposing the dynamics between these two people, however, it is ultimately a look at how one person could never rise beyond, let alone above, her shattering circumstances. And that close look leaves readers with more questions than resolutions.

Grealy is often unappealing in this telling, quite different from the sympathetic and talented young woman in Autobiography of a Face. In the end, readers are left wondering why Patchett adhered herself, albeit to varying degrees over the years, to such a woman.

Patchett's story begs the question: Would she have done her friend more justice if she had left Grealy's memoir alone - giving her friend the last word on what she was truly about?

Cathie Beck is a Denver freelance writer and writing instructor.

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