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Jan 24, 2017bethwpr rated this title 1.5 out of 5 stars
I'm going to start by saying I've never read any of Ann Patchett's or Lucy Grealy's other books, so I don't have any prejudices one way or the other of them as creative writers, much less as people. With that said, I have to agree with the majority of the one- and two-star Goodreads reviews; I couldn't care less about either of these two people and the person about whom Patchett is writing is an attention-seeking, needy, narcissistic user, and I don't just mean of drugs, I mean of people. Moreover, Patchett often refers to herself as the "ant" in the relationship, which is to say the codependent, a role she could give up at any time but does not. Even toward the end when Patchett seems to pull away from Grealy's destructive impact due to addiction, she is second guessing her decision not to tell Grealy she was in New York the night of her overdose. Thinking Patchett could have bought Grealy more time she says, "...and I wonder who I'm asking. She is dead, and I have nothing to ask for at all. The truth is, I would have settled for a week. In that time I would have found my patience again. It had come back to me a hundred times before. That was part of Lucy's genius in having so many friends. We all lost our patience with her, but never at the same time. If one of us was tired, there was always someone else there to pick up the lamp and lead her home. It would have been me again, I know that. There was a time, just a moment that night in the Park Avenue Cafe, I had thought I could let her go. But now I know I was simply not cut out for life without her. I am living that life now and would not choose it. If Lucy couldn't give up the heroin, I could not give up Lucy." Oh, give me a break, Saint Ann! This memoir does not illustrate true friendship. I was willing for the book to skip around a bit at the beginning to establish Patchett and Grealy as people, but it was so disjointed at first, I had a hard time knowing them let along sympathizing with them as people. Yes, Grealy endured terrible surgeries as a result of damage from childhood cancer treatments, but toward the end she didn't know when to stop/brought that on herself, and these trials did not make up for the fact she had an insatiable need to be liked and loved by people, collecting friends like house dust and sleeping with a lot of men in search of love, but never keeping the boyfriends, at least one of whom was still really loyal to her as a person long after they broke up. Did she even know what love was? I think she was too caught up in herself/self love to really recognize that. It was never enough. As for Patchett, as noted above, she regularly presents this story like she's the martyr putting up with the careless, irresponsible person who has more talent, and it's pretty obvious that she's passively resentful of that. As other reviewers have noted, one of Grealy's sister's wrote a column in the Guardian objecting to this book and Patchett's portrayal of her sister (there is little mention of Grealy's family and little of what is said is flattering). There are two sides to every story, but it does make one wonder what Patchett's motives were in writing this book, aside from making money off her dead "friend."