Chapter Ten 2

     "I didn't remember it," Lucy said pointedly. "I wrote it. I'm a writer."
     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.

Chapter Ten

Lucy's favorite rhetorical question was, "Will I ever have sex again?"

     Lucy had plenty of other questions as well: "Do you love me?" "You think I'm pretty, don't you?" "Do you think I'm a good writer?" But the odd part was they were all so interchangeable. What all of the questions really meant was, "Everything is going to be okay, right?" 

--From Ann Patchett's Truth and Beuaty

Lucy wanted to make sure she was going to be all right in the end. Lucy had her question answered in complete affirmation by Ann, almost all the time without any objection to why she was asked so many times a day and why so many variations? I can only imagine how hard it must be to have a face that is constantly changing. How confounding you would find yourself before a mirror and see how the face you remember from last week is replaced by a new one. So you don't know who you are, really. There is no connection between your face and your name. But you would be special--to be on TV and have friends all around you and be a bestselling writer. To be Lucy Grealy.