This was a very touching and moving memoir of a friendship. A friendship that wasn’t easy, both women seemed to be dependent to an extreme of one another, but then what true friendship isn’t more than just late night calls and smiles.
Ann Patchett gives us an intimate portrait of what being friends which Lucy Grealy meant. Lucy, in her own right an accomplished writer, was demanding, full of life, and full of insecurities but Ann Patchett was always there for her.
From their days as students in recognized writing programs to their lives in New York, we get a glimpse of what it was like to run with the writing crowd. Ann Patchett writes of Lucy’s difficult times with the countless medical procedures, she writes of Lucy’s failed affairs and Lucy’s tremendous need for being loved.
You can’t help but feel sad for Lucy and for Ann. One too needy the other one perhaps needed to feel needed. My only quibble with the book is that I would have liked to have heard more of Lucy’s family. Certainly they were there for her or weren’t they? It seems that all of Lucy’s problems fall on Ann’s lap and perhaps that is truly what it felt like to be her friend but I feel like something must have been missing in what the reader is being told. In the end the reader can’t help but think, am I this kind of friend? Would I be able to be this kind of friend?