This shocked the audience more than her dismissal of illness, but she made her point: she was making art, not documenting an event. That she chose to tell her own extraordinary story was of secondary importance. Her cancer and subsequent suffering had not made this book. She had made it. Her intellect and ability were in every sense larger than the disease.
--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty
Because it is so good I write another post on chapter ten.
There are those gaps you have to fill in. There are those names and faces and places and things you do not remember precisely. So nonfiction cannot be completely true. But what Lucy wrote was true nonfiction. She was a cancer survivor, yes, but a better writer first.
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