Truth and Beauty: A Friendship » (Unabridged, 6 Cassettes, 8.5 Hours)

After selling her first story to the Paris Review while still in college, Ann Patchett was steadily publishing her poignant, award-winning novels by her early 20s. In fact, her first novel sold 24 hours after it had been sent out. From the fantastical Bel Canto to the heartrending memoir Truth and Beauty, Patchett's precocious beginnings have blossomed into a major literary career.

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

What happens when the person who is your family is someone you aren't bound to by blood? What happens when that person is not your lover, but your best friend? In her frank and startlingly intimate first work of nonfiction, Truth & Beauty, Ann Patchett shines light on the little-explored world of women's friendships and shows us what it means to stand together.

Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and after enrolling in 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 a Face, Lucy Grealy wrote about the first half of her life. In Truth & Beauty,...

USA Today - Jocelyn McClurg

Truth & Beauty (the title comes from a chapter in Grealy's Autobiography) is heartbreaking, funny, disturbing, at times infuriating just like the odd but endearing Lucy.