The Ant & The Grasshopper, pen and ink on graph paper, doodle © 2008 by ybonesy. All rights reserved.
At Sarah Lawrence College, Ann Patchett admired the hugely popular Lucy Grealy from afar, never realizing that the two were destined to become the greatest of friends. Ann wrote short stories that people liked but was not someone they remembered. Lucy was the one everyone knew.
Talented poet, waif who as a child lost part of her jaw to cancer, Lucy ran the Friday night film series back at Sarah Lawrence. Students chanted “LOO-cee, LOO-cee, LOO-cee,” and crowded into the coffee shop to hear her read her poetry. Ann sat in the audience, watching, believing they might have something in common.
Now this. It is August 1985. Ann and Lucy are the only two from their graduation class who’ve been accepted into the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Lucy couldn’t afford her own place; hence, the two are roommates, meeting up for the first time since arriving in Iowa City. Ann stands in their empty house, and like a banshee Lucy shoots through the door and throws her ninety-five-pound body on to Ann, locking arms around neck and legs around waist.
Here is Patchett writing in her memoir Truth & Beauty: A Friendship:
I do not remember our love unfolding, that we got to know one another and in time became friends. I only remember that she came through the door and it was there, huge and permanent and first.
And so their friendship began. Instantaneous, complex, epic. It lasted seventeen years, until 2002. Lucy died in December of that year of a drug overdose — ruled accidental — at the age of thirty-nine.
Writing Truth & Beauty, Patchett said, was part of her mourning process: “I wrote a book about us. I wrote it as a way to memorialize her and mourn her, and as a way of keeping her own important memoir, Autobiography of a Face, alive, even as I had not been able to keep her alive. This was a story of a Herculean effort to endure hardship, and to be a friend.”
The Ant & The Grasshopper
Throughout the book, Patchett draws on Aesop’s fable of “The Ant & The Grasshopper” as metaphor for her relationship with Grealy. Ann is the industrious Ant, laboring through summer to have food in winter. Grasshopper Lucy whiles away time, too concerned with the business of living to think about the future.
When winter comes, Grasshopper finds himself dying of hunger, while Ant eats from the stores collected in the summer. But in her version of the fable, Patchett makes this modification:
What the story didn’t tell you is that the ant relented at the eleventh hour and took in the grasshopper when the weather was hard, fed him on his tenderest store of grass all winter…Grasshoppers … find the ants … They need us to survive, but we need them as well. They were the ones who brought the truth and beauty to the party, which Lucy could tell you as she recited her Keats over breakfast, was better than food any day.
And so Patchett tells the whole story of Ant and Grasshopper — their dependencies and differences, the sordid details of their lives.
Ann and Lucy were creative muse to one another, better off together than apart. “We were tender and patient and kind. We were not like the world at all.” They were physically in the same city only for a small portion of their long friendship. Ann eventually settled back home, in Nashville, while Lucy’s home base was the glamour and glitter and grit of New York City.
Apart and together, they shared a deep desire to become real writers. Writing was not only salvation but the one thing that made the two of them interesting. And Lucy, with her celebrity and high drama, made Ann more interesting and more alive:
Even when Lucy was devastated or difficult, she was the person I knew best in the world, the person I was the most comfortable with. Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn’t even realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.
Even so, for all their soul-deep connection, these two friends grew apart. Lucy became more needy, Ann less patient. Each became her own person.
Year of the Grasshopper
On the back cover of her memoir, Autobiography of a Face, Grealy is quoted: “I spent five years of my life being treated for cancer, but since then I’ve spent fifteen years being treated for nothing other than looking different from everyone else. It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly, that I always viewed as the great tragedy of my life. The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison.”
Autobiography of a Face made Lucy famous. She struck the universal chord — of wanting to belong, to not be different.
The memoir starts with the diagnosis of Ewing’s Sarcoma at age nine. After chemotherapy and radiation, reconstruction began. Lucy’s life was on hold as she waited for surgery after surgery — thirty-eight total — to bring forth normalcy, possibly even beauty.
While she waited, her insecurities deepened, becoming incessant and overwhelming. Do you love me? Do you think I’m pretty? Why doesn’t he love me? Will I ever have sex again? She wanted to be loved, but more than anything, she wanted to give love. She confused sex for love.
Grealy wrote of early drug use in Autobiography of a Face. She got codeine pills for each surgery and root canal, and after a while, even when she wasn’t in pain, she took the pills for the milky high they offered.
No matter how bad I felt about the world, about my position in it, I felt safe and secure and even rather happy thirty or forty minutes after I’d downed a couple of pills.
In spite of securing a book contract on the heels of her memoir, Grealy struggled with writing. The surgeries became more painful and less effective, her loneliness deeper and more despairing. She could hardly swallow food, and the physical pain intensified. She was tormented by self-hatred. Eventually she got hooked on heroin. She lost the book contract, lost the trust of her friends, and eventually lost her life.
Year of the Ant
Ann was a product of twelve years of Catholic school, “where we were not in the business of discovering our individuality.” Her Ant traits included:
- Enviable work ethic, writing her novel “as if it were a factory job.”
- Balance.
- Responsible (she funded her own degree, prepared for classes she taught, and used every writing fellowship to get actual writing done).
- A tendency to “blur into other people.”
- Tidy (“Unlike Lucy, I could never give myself so completely over to my art that I would not notice the half-eaten plate of spaghetti in the middle of the living room floor.”).
- Above all, always going to be fine; “It’s your blessing and your curse,” Lucy once told her.
From the moment Lucy jumped into her arms in their Iowa City rental house, until almost the end of Lucy’s life, Ann carried Lucy. Physically at times, and emotionally. Ann was present during Lucy’s many jaw reconstruction surgeries, holding her head while she puked into a pan or serving as patient advocate with medical staff. More fundamentally, Ann soothed as best she could Lucy’s constant self-doubt and tried to boost her esteem.
It was the single thing I wanted most for Lucy, to have a minute of peace from her relentless desire to understand why she hadn’t found True Love.
Toward the end of Lucy’s life, as her emotional and physical pain spiraled out of Ann’s control, the pragmatist Ant sought tangible ways to help the Grasshopper — sorting and paying bills or furnishing a new kitchen. Ann tried to get Lucy to move from New York to Nashville, to go through a sort of Ant-inspired rehab. Shelter, soft “Lucy food,” love.
But Lucy was never going to live in Nashville. Even if it might have saved her life, it wasn’t the life she wanted.
It’s natural to look at your closest friends and wonder how you’re different from them and how you’re the same. Early on, the differences are exotic. Have you ever been attracted to a friend who is so spontaneous — pure in-the-moment grasshopper — that you can’t help but be drawn to their energy? There’s something about how natural Grasshopper is, without filters and boundaries, that makes Ant more natural.
But then your ant nature kicks in. Try as you may, you can’t stop from becoming critical. Ant watches Grasshopper refuse to plan for the future or seem unable to take cues on when to stop talking about herself. Enough already! you want to say. Grow up! It’s not all about you.
The further I got into Truth & Beauty, the more I grew impatient with Lucy. I found that my admiration for her brilliance dulled at certain points, overtaken by my exasperation with her obsessions and insecurities. Yet, when I was done, I admired even more the deep, pure writing that came out of those same obsessions and insecurities.
My face may have closed the door on love and beauty in their fleeting states, but didn’t my face also open me up to perceptions I might otherwise be blind to? At the end of each day, as I lay in the bathtub, I looked at my undeveloped child’s body. I considered the desire to have it develop into a woman’s body a weakness, a straying from my chosen path of truth. And as I lay in bed at night, I considered my powers, my heightened sense of self-awareness, feeling not as if I had chosen this path, but that it had been chosen for me.
I also at times winced at the bald honesty with which Patchett laid her truth on the line. Ann admitting to Lucy her growing revulsion at how Lucy lived her life. Lucy calling Ann on her superiority, her got-it-all-togetherness: “…at least I can make you feel like a saint. That’s what you’ve always wanted.”
I read Grealy’s book first, then Patchett’s, then Grealy’s again, this time looking for clues as to what really caused her addictions and eventual death. Was it the cancer or the shame that came with having part of her face caved in? Or was there something in her core – recklessness, risk-taking – that was apparent early on?
I came to no conclusions. Or rather, I came to the conclusion that writing memoir is the most courageous and risky kind of writing one can undertake.
Not everyone loved Truth & Beauty. At Clemson University in South Carolina, Patchett’s book generated enormous and uninformed criticism for its portrayal of drugs, sex, and women in romantic relationship. Patchett talks about that firestorm in an essay published in the Atlantic Monthly in August 2007 and again in an interview with the same magazine.
Lucy Grealy’s older sister, Suellen Grealy, wrote a heartbreaking essay titled “Hijacked by grief,” in which she lashes out at the “not so gifted” Ann Patchett for “hitching her wagon” to Lucy’s star. These jabs stand out against an almost polite tone of desperation, a genuine longing for privacy and a return to wholeness for a family that has been picked apart.
Ann and Lucy started out believing writing might save their lives. Each walked the long, arduous road to become a writer. But even when a writer is brilliant and talented, and even when a writer possesses equanimity and self-control, writing will not save one’s life.
Writing does, however, demand that you be willing to let go, to let it out, to write the truth as you know it.
Must-Read – Must-Hear
- “Fresh Air”/NPR Re-Broadcast of an interview with Lucy Grealy (1/3/2003)
- “Remembering Lucy Grealy,” NPR (12/23/2002)
- “Truth & Beauty – A Tale of Friendship,” NPR interview with Ann Patchett, (5/11/2004)
- “Take a good look at my face,” The Guardian interview with Lucy Grealy (2/16/1995)
- “Lucy Grealy,” Leonard Lopate/WNCY interview with Lucy Grealy (scroll several screens down the page) (9/15/2000)
Must-See
Charlie Rose interviewed Lucy Grealy on November 16, 1994. She is the last guest on his hour-long program. Her interview starts approximately at 38:20 on the youtube video below. [Note: It’s advised that you let the show run its course versus trying to fast-forward to the start of the interview; the latter might cause audio and video to get out of sync.]
-Related to posts Ann Patchett – On Truth, Beauty, & The Adventures Of “Opera Girl” and Book Talk – Do You Let Yourself Read?
What a wonderful friendship they had. People who criticize books for their subject matter tend not to read them. They would rather let some yahoo tell them what the book said and that becomes the truth.
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ybonesy,
I really enjoyed this post. I had always wanted to read the piece Lucy’s sister wrote (thanks for the link), and I got such a strong sense of Lucy watching the Charlie Rose interview (thanks, again).
Like you, I reached no conclusions. I would form them (depending on which book I was reading), and then toss them out. I loved both of the books, though, and expect I will visit them again and again. I remember Natalie talking in Taos about learning to hold the good with the bad in people. Just holding both without judgment. I think that’s where I’ve landed with both Ann and Lucy. I do wish I could have heard Lucy speak while she was alive.
I had planned on my trip to Iowa City this weekend to try to find the green house on Governor Street that you wrote about. Sadly the flooding in Iowa is creating real danger. The Iowa Writer’s Workshop is a stone’s throw from the Iowa River, and they are expecting it to flood the campus. The focus of everyone is on sandbagging; class cancelled.
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That’s too bad, Teri. Will it be rescheduled?
I’ve said it before, but I love that you make this extra effort when you go on trips to visit the places famous authors have lived. If the class is rescheduled and you eventually get to go, I’d love to hear about it.
Both books were fantastic. Patchett’s still amazes me when I think about how much she got across about her friendship and herself and Lucy. The structure of that book is perfect. It’s almost as if there is no structure, it’s just one long story.
And Grealy’s book I could read three more times and get something out of each reading. I also liked hearing her voice and seeing her; it clicked with the voice in the book.
From Truth & Beauty, what still sticks with me is Ann’s patience with Lucy. How did Ann get past judging her friend or finally throwing up her hands? And I guess in the end, she kind of didn’t get past it. Ann did seem to finally reach her limits.
But, Bob, back to your comment, that was the beauty of this friendship — the patience, love, and magic.
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ybonesy,
what a well-written, thorough post. thanks for this. i read grealy’s autobiography, then patchett’s book only about a month ago. i loved them both. i also read grealy’s sister’s article in the guardian, which i thought was very well-written. i wish there was an opportunity to read every story from so many different perspectives. i hadn’t read patchett’s article in atlantic. i’m excited to take a look at that. i’m glad that grealy’s story is continuing to find new readers — it’s an important tribute to her life, her struggle, to be remembered forever.
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ybonesy, I just read your piece slowly and deliberately with my morning coffee. What a treat. Thanks so much for all the work you put into this post.
Well-written, informative, presenting both sides effectively. I love the structure and the way you laid it out using the Ant and the Grasshopper. Also the illustration. Beautiful. It is a piece I will come back to again.
I read all the articles in the links in the body of the post. I want to save the Must Read, See, and Hear for later.
I have read Truth & Beauty and I loved it. Have not read Autobiography of a Face yet. But it is on my list. I had the honor of hearing Ann at the Fitzgergald Theater last year. She is honest, funny, witty, and allows herself to be vulnerable.
I hope people read Ann Patchett’s articles in the Atlantic monthly (you provide the links in your piece). One is a great piece she wrote about what happened at Clemson. The other a wonderful interview about her relationship with Lucy. She is very eloquent in her understanding.
Three things stick out for me:
1) How threatened people are by close relationships between women (and by strong women in general) and how quick they are to judge. Love in any form is the greatest gift we can give or receive. It is not for others to judge.
2) The Clemson incident with Ken Wingate seems critical for every writer to read and understand. When you take risks in your writing, it is out there for all to judge. To Clemson’s credit, they did not ban Truth & Beauty. They stuck by Ann. When we get into banning books, literature, art, we are no longer living in a democracy. Ann’s response in the Atlantic monthly is a must read. And particularly how rude the kids in the Clemson audience were to her. How did we become such a rude society.
3) The limits of enabling versus sticking by good friends. It did seem like Ann reached her limits right before Lucy died and felt angry with her. But in the interview at the Atlantic monthly, in hindsight, she doesn’t feel that she enabled Lucy:
Strong statement. And controversial. Especially for many who have had to deal with addiction among friends and family members.
ybonesy, I really liked these lines from your piece:
Have you ever been attracted to a friend who is so spontaneous – pure in-the-moment grasshopper – that you can’t help but be drawn to their energy? There’s something about how natural Grasshopper is, without filters and boundaries, that makes Ant more natural.
I have known and loved friends like that – wild and spontaneous. And though they sometimes scared me, they also made me feel more alive. To know what it is to feel deep passion is so important.
Were there any insights you learned about yourself, your creative life, your friends, from writing this piece?
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Teri —
(from Comment #7) I had planned on my trip to Iowa City this weekend to try to find the green house on Governor Street that you wrote about. Sadly the flooding in Iowa is creating real danger. The Iowa Writer’s Workshop is a stone’s throw from the Iowa River, and they are expecting it to flood the campus. The focus of everyone is on sandbagging; class cancelled.
So sorry to hear your Iowa class was cancelled. I was thinking about that last night when I was watching the flooding of rivers and the tornado footage and the Boy Scout camp that was wiped out in Iowa. Serious business.
Like ybonesy, I’m wondering, too, if they will reschedule it for another time. How disappointing.
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Great post. I read Truth and Beauty last year and was very moved……I keep meaning to order the Grealy autobiography. Thanks.
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When I watched the Charlie Rose interview (and having read Truth and Beauty), I didn’t feel convinced of how together and accepting Lucy seemed to be about her face. I mean, I guess there’s no reason to expose the world to all her private demons, but Ann’s book had me thinking, “Oh, Lucy. I know you’re unraveling.”
The word at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop is that the rest of the summer session is up for grabs. They thought the river would crest today, and then they will know where they stand with damage. It is clear they want to reschedule the courses. I was so psyched to leave early today…I felt paralyzed when I woke up this morning. I thought about driving to Madison County to see the gorgeous bridges again, but I couldn’t switch my mental gears.
I will definitely check in about the green house if I go to Iowa City later this summer.
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Thanks, lissa. Interesting that you also read the books recently. I can’t remember what it is that prompted me to read the books this year. Maybe it was commentary on this blog. In fact, it might have been Teri’s comment in another post (I’ll have to find it) that she was reading Grealy’s followed by Patchett’s. That seemed like a good idea.
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QM, glad you found a good time in your day to read the post. Slowly over coffee sounds perfect. It is the longest post I’ve written for red Ravine, I think, and looking at it in all its screen-after-screen glory, I feel bad that I couldn’t say what I wanted to in a more blog-appropriate length. So, I do appreciate you giving it your full attention.
Yes, the commotion Ken Wingate made was amazing, and how it grew and grew. That really surprised me. I would never have thought the book could be so controversial, and in fact, I didn’t know that about the book until I wrote this piece, and even at that, not until I was well into the writing of this post.
Suellen Grealy’s essay also was new information, and I guess I wasn’t as surprised that that kind of conflict could occur. That seems to be inherent in memoir and creative non-fiction.
I’m still digesting the book and its many implications, QM. There’s so much to learn about friendships, so much I would like to apply to my own ability to be a friend. But it will take me some time to understand what I can take away from these books and these two women’s stories.
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ybonesy, it *was* surprising that things got that out of hand with the events at Clemson. And that it came down to wanting a book to be banned. As if that’s going to protect children from experiencing the world. It seemed like part of what happened was that sections of Ann’s book (what they felt were explicit parts that illustrated their point) were posted on an Internet website, completely out of context.
I thought Ann handled it well by citing all of the classic literature books they would have to ban in order to protect their kids from reading things they found offensive.
I had not read the piece by Suellen Grealy before either. That would also be good for memoir writers to read. Even though the family gave permission for Lucy’s letters to be released, they weren’t happy about their decision later, or the outcome.
The whole thing is as complicated as the tangled web of human relationship and emotion. And all from a book that Ann wrote in a matter of, what was it, 6 to 8 weeks, in order to deal with the grieving process of losing her friend. It’s a lot to think about. No easy answers.
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Oh, yb, wonderful post. I have not read either book, but I will now. Don’t feel one bit bad about the length of this post. I’ll admit, when I first glanced at it last night, I thought, “Oh, I don’t have time for this now,” but, then I began reading and I did not stop, digesting it one word at a time, including all the links. You structured it beautifully, very enticing, and at the end, I felt satisfied. It was reading that was worth every minute spent.
I saved my comment for today, so that I could read through it one more time. Thank you for your careful effort.
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breathepeace,
One of my co-workers from the Minnesota State Fair is flying to Wyoming (Cheyenne) to visit her sister. I told her all about your fabulous library (thanks to your previous information about it), and she is going to visit it. When I was telling her about the library and the award received, she wasn’t surprised. She said, “Oh, that’s how Cheyenne is. Everything is really nice.” Thought you’d likely agree. 🙂
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Thanks, Teri, for the referral to the Laramie County Library. Your co-worker will not be disappointed! We are still celebrating being Library Journal’s 2008 Library of the Year -it’s quite an honor!
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ybonesy, what wonderful drawings. When I arrived at the post this morning, I wondered at the beauty of the doodles. You have quite a talent for doodling. Have you ever illustrated books?
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Thanks, Bob. No, I’ve never illustrated books. It’s been fun to illustrate some of our blog posts, though.
Thanks for the comments, everyone. I just spent a day painting a Peanut Butter & Jelly pre-school, and I am exhausted. Jim is reading Omnivore’s Dilemma (Michael Pollen), and after a long bath, I plan to settle in with Patricia Hampl’s The Florist’s Daughter, which I started at the cabin a couple of weeks ago.
I have so fallen in love with memoir. I can see why it has spiked in popularity. And I’ve also come to realize how hard it is to write memoir that really makes someone think, Why bother?
There was a quote in one of the radio links, I think it might have been the Fresh Air or one of the others, where the narrator quoted a review of Autobiography of a Face who talked about what made this book so good compared to other memoirs. I don’t have the quote handy now, but it was about the reader seeing something out of someone else’s eyes. Achieving that versus simply describing an experience — you know the difference. I think both these memoirs have given me that lens. I’ll report back on whether the one I’m reading now does the same.
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Well said, ybonesy. Looking forward to what you discover about Patricia Hampl’s book. That’s one I want to read, too.
Peanut butter and jelly seems good. 8)
I just got home from the Walker and a performance piece by Meredith Monk with videographer Ann Hamilton — Songs of Ascension for vocal ensemble and string quartet. Beautiful. They got a standing O. I’m still vibrating.
And looking forward to the weekend. It’s a beautiful evening in Minneapolis. We drove home through downtown and things are hopping, so different than the quiet calm and centering strings of Ascension.
Sweet dreams.
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ybonesy: prodigious post. Thank you. I have read both Grealy’s memoir and Truth and Beauty. This post made me pull out my copies and see what I underlined when I first read them several years ago. A quote in Truth and Beauty may offer some perspective on why Grealy’s memoir was “so good compared to other memoirs.” At a reading after Face was published, Lucy was asked:
“‘It’s amazing how you remember everything so clearly,’ a woman said, her head wrapped in a bright scarf. ‘All those conversations, details. Were you ever worried that you might get something wrong?’
“‘I didn’t remember it,’ Lucy said pointedly. ‘I wrote it. I’m a writer.'”
That’s a bold response, don’t you think? “I didn’t remember it. I wrote it.”
Which comes first? The remembering or the writing? According to Grealy, it’s the writing. That’s how powerful it is.
Thanks much for the inspiration.
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That is a bold response. When I first read it, it reminded me of the whole conversation we had in the zendo about Diana Abu Jaber’s interview where she talked about how she sometimes blended memories into one. Except Lucy’s statement was bolder and more to the point. You write it.
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QM, after Em read me a chapter from her book, The Doll People, I tried to read my book but couldn’t keep my eyes open. Much better this morning after sleeping like a rock 8) .
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ybonesy, it’s garden day here today. Perfect weather for it. I think I dreamed about the meditative quality of Meredith Monk’s performance. It’s breezy and cool and I can’t wait to get my fingers down in the garden dirt. I’ll say hi to both the Ant and the Grasshopper when I see them. 8)
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Oh, forgot I wanted to mention — good observation about the remembering and the writing. Which comes first. Or is it a beautiful blend, both happening at once. Writing Practice does uncover memories I didn’t know I even had. Part of the beauty of the Practice. So am I writing and remembering and then writing again? Fun to ponder out in the garden today.
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QM, you and Teri are going to enjoy Hampl’s The Florist’s Daughter. Hampl is from the Twin Cities, and one of the threads has to do with not having left “home.” That thread is connected to her parents, and being geographically close to them, especially as they age.
But it’s great for me to read this because when she mentions things like Mickey’s Diner or other landmarks, I feel like I know of them, thanks to posts you’ve done on this blog about Minneapolis/Twin Cities.
I’ll save future comments about the memoir for our “Book Talk” post, but I just wanted to mention this to you here. Also, I’m not very far into it, but last night I did manage to get halfway through a new chapter. I’m going to have to read during the day instead of saving it for nighttime. I’m too sleepy by the time bedtime rolls around these days.
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ybonesy, I’m looking forward to it. I want to try to pick it up at an independent bookstore. I’m hoping to visit Birchbark and find it there. So cool that you now know some of the other Twin Cities landmarks from the posts and comments.
BTW, I have found the same thing lately. By the time I get into bed, I’m just too tired to read. I almost have to dedicate quiet time to reading during the day. Sometimes it’s just so hard to put a book down though. My favorite times are when I’m reading on a weekend day when I don’t have other plans and can just keep going on a book. Then I’m always sad when it ends.
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Teri, we just watched some footage of the flooding and sandbagging at the Univesity of Iowa in Iowa City (Comments #2 & #8). The Iowa River isn’t even expected to crest until Tuesday morning.
Though it must be disappointing, I am glad you are safe up here in the Twin Cities. And I hope they reschedule the Writers’ Workshop you were going to attend at a later date when things are back to normal down there.
They interviewed one woman who said they were sandbagging around the U of Iowa library to save all their collections and archives of old and rare books. There is the potential for so much loss when destructive weather hits.
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Patricia Hampl is one of those names I keep running into everywhere lately; I haven’t read any of her books. I love that you recognized landmarks from the Twin Cities, ybonesy! I went to Birchbark Books this morning, and saw The Florist’s Daughter (it’s under the canoe, QM). I bought The Elements of Style, a book Stephen King talks about constantly in his book On Writing.
I have felt discombobulated all weekend not being in Iowa as planned. I, too, saw some footage of the university and the great efforts the students are making to sandbag. FYI, the building that held the Iowa Writer’s Workshop for years is called the English-Philosophy Building. Think: Flannery O’Connor, Ann Patchett, Lucy Grealy, Robert Bly. It is a building with four floors, and the top floor was devoted exclusively to the writing program. Last year, I went up there several times and walked up and down the halls that were semi-dark. Lots of good juju.
The master’s program is now in a little house on campus, a home that used to be where the gardener or dean or someone like that lived. The English-Philosophy Building is where they still have the summer classes for people like me; and it’s right next to the Iowa River.
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The flooding just seems to get worse each day, Teri. I saw on the news this morning that much of what’s flooded into people’s homes and businesses is raw sewage. Do you know, are the storms abating at all?
Teri, I love Elements of Style. It was the sytle book my copyeditor used religiously many years ago when I was an advertising copywriter. She used to walk me through all the changes, and, believe me, for every piece I did there were tons! She was older, probably the age I am now, and I was in my mid-20s, so rather than simply handing me the changes with no explanation, she took the time to walk me through the why of each edit. I so appreciate her mentorship, especially now.
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QM, so true about what you say re: dedicating time to read during the day. And your post “Book Talk” went into good detail on the importance of doing so.
Jim managed to finish his book this weekend, and that’s exactly what he did — he dove into it and gave himself the time to read. For some reason, I’m not diving into my books the way he is. I don’t know if it’s that I’m just not taking the time, or whether the books aren’t grabbing my attention. I know with certain books, I definitely get glued to them.
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Teri — I loved this line from #26:
“The master’s program is now in a little house on campus, a home that used to be where the gardener or dean or someone like that lived.”
I’m thinking that the gardener would love this line (the dean maybe less so) since their houses are probably not often confused within the academic community.
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Good point, breathepeace. Score one for the gardener’s team.
It’s going to be sunny and dry all week in Iowa City, and the predictions are that the town will fare much better than Cedar Rapids, just to the north. I’ve heard conflicting reports on when the Iowa River is going to crest, but I think by Tuesday night the town will be on the other side of the hurdle.
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The copy of The Elements of Style I got at Birchbark Books is illustrated. It makes a book on technique quite inviting. There are two forwards, one by E.B. White (Charlotte’s Web), and another by Roger Angell, E.B.’s son-in-law. The illustrations and the introductions alone make the book worth buying the book.
I loved hearing your history with the book, ybonesy. Do you still have the copy you used when you were in your twenties?
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I didn’t know Roger Angell was E.B. White’s son-in-law. Remember we read a Roger Angell essay for our Intensive? It started with him peeing in the garden at some high society party. I don’t think it had anything to do with baseball, although I might be mistaken since that’s his forte.
No, I don’t have that copy, and it never was mine. It belonged either to the ad agency or our copyeditor. She had an English degree from College of William & Mary. These things stick out to me, probably because my own grammar was so poor. I regularly said things like “Me and Sarah are going to lunch,” instead of “Sarah and I.”
This is the same woman the owner hired to give me grammar lessons every Tuesday over lunch for almost a year. I was so ashamed when the lessons first started, but now I am so grateful.
I keep my copy of the book at work. I guess it makes me feel more writerly to have my hardback dictionary and my style book on the shelf above my desk. I had my synonym finder there, too, but I brought that one home recently. I’ll probably do the same with the other two.
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BTW, Teri, I will before too long do a post about Stephen King and the short story. Perhaps I should read Stephen King’s book on writing first. I might see if I can find it. Would you recommend the book?
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ybonesy,
I don’t remember the Roger Angell essay. Did you keep a copy? I have been wishing I had a copy of the Saul Bellow essay Natalie read to us–the one where he was walking through Paris.
Wow, ybonesy…grammar lessons. They must have seen such promise in you to offer you that opportunity. I now could never picture you saying, “Me and Sarah are going to lunch.”
I give Stephen King’s book the highest praise. It is a page turner, makes you laugh out loud, and you never want the book to end. It was the first Stephen King book I’ve read–ever.
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Cool, I will definitely look it up. I bought Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird recently. I’ve been intrigued to see what different writers have to say about the craft, and even though they say it with different words and in different ways, those I’ve read seem to say the same thing about tapping that writer within and writing without editing. Also, about guarding creative space.
Yeah, Teri, even after four years of college, my street talk was pretty ingrained. I used to get my papers back from College English with red marks all over, and always the “So-and-so and I” written across my “Me and so-and-so” — it just never clicked. Our copyeditor started with sentence structure, object and subject, and it wasn’t until I understood those very basic concepts that it finally did click. Learning a second language also helped, because I learned that language from the basics up.
The Roger Angell essay was in the 2006 Best American Essays that Ann Patchett guest edited. I think that was the year and she was the editor. I might have bought that book, so when I’m back home I’ll check my shelves.
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[…] The Ant & The Grasshopper – Ann Patchett & Lucy Grealy – in-depth essay on Truth & Beauty, Autobiography of a Face, and the symbolism behind the Ant and the Grasshopper, including a beautiful pen and ink color illustration […]
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I started reading a different book by Patricia Hampl (we mention her in comments in this post). It’s called I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory. It’s about the writing of memoir, and here is a sentence or two about what she touches on:
In this timely collection, Ms. Hampl “weaves personal stories and grand ideas into shimmering bolts of prose” (Minneapolis Star Tribune) as she considers the habit of autobiographical writing that enchants and bedevils her. Hampl reflects on her family’s response to her writing, the ethics of writing about family and friends, the subterfuges and falsities of memoir.
We’ve talked about these aspects of memoir-writing in other posts, and I wasn’t sure where best to leave this comment, so I hope anyone who is interested in writing memoir will check out this book. It’s written just for us.
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[…] & The Adventures Of “Opera Girl” Which Came First, The Grasshopper Or The Egg? The Ant & The Grasshopper – Ann Patchett & Lucy Grealy Book Talk – Do You Let Yourself […]
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[…] surrounding the ant and the grasshopper — (for more detail, see ybonesy’s post The Ant & The Grasshopper – Ann Patchett & Lucy Grealy). For me, the myth is more delicious than the truth; perhaps the ant wants to keep its little […]
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[…] https://redravine.wordpress.com/2008/06/12/the-ant-the-grasshopper-ann-patchett-lucy-grealy/ […]
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[…] and despite hating e-books with a burning, blinding passion, find myself returning to it often. This is an excellent review of T&B. And, after finishing Truth & Beauty, course I had to Google for more Lucy, which is how and […]
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[…] to posts: The Ant & The Grasshopper – Ann Patchett & Lucy Grealy, Which Came First, The Grasshopper Or The Egg?, Ann Patchett – On Truth, Beauty, & The […]
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Ann Patchett sounds like an opportunist. How does everyone seem to miss how Ann took advantage of her friendship with Lucy? She used Lucy people! I also read Autobiography of a Face many years ago. At that time, I fell in love with Lucy. I then innocently tried to read Truth and Beauty and it wreaked with Ann inserting herself where she didn’t belong. The unhealthy, co-dependency begins with Lucy’s first request of Ann. Lucy was manipulated into living with Ann. Ann tells on herself all over Truth & Beauty. .
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[…] I lived in Tennessee for a few years as a child, but had never been to Music City. We also visited Ann Patchett’s bookstore Parnassus Books; we try to visit independent bookstores wherever we travel. We were lucky […]
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