This book is a companion to Truth & Beauty - the book that Lucy Grealy wrote about her experiences with cancer and how it shaped the rest of her life. It was interesting to see Lucy through her own eyes vs. those of Ann Patchett. Reading Ann's book, I often wondered how you could have a friend that was needy all the time. Reading Lucy's book, I could see being friends with her.
The prose of this novel showed the poet in Lucy - the precision of language. But it was also interesting to see the things she left out of her life story and the things Patchett's book added. This book focused more on her childhood and the many surgeries to reconstruct her jaw. In the later years, Lucy doesn't mention how she supports herself or how she survives from one surgery to the next. I think that if you read one of these two books, you should really read the other. It will make you think of her in a different light.
It'll go on the shelf for now. It might go out in the next purge depending on how I feel about it then.
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