I think the publisher is trying to flog this as Patchett’s memoir, which it ain’t. It’s a collection of her non-fiction, stuff she cheerfully points out in the intro was mostly written to pay the rent while she worked on her novels. Which fits in to my current thirst for essays very well. I have read some of Patchett’s fiction, and loved it, but the book of hers that walloped me was Truth & Beauty. The story of her friendship with author Lucy Grealy, I read it in my early twenties and had never encountered such a deep examination of female friendship. It’s still a personal touchstone for me, one of those books that reached me just when I needed it.
She touches on the legacy of that book twice in this collection, in two works that confront the attempted banning of Truth & Beauty when it was assigned as college reading. Her tone is a little shrill when dealing with it, but then, if someone dismissed my work as Satan-loving pornography, I’d be shoving a pitchfork in their nethers, not demonstrating nearly as much good grace.
There is a lot of biography in here: her parent’s miserable marriage, her own joyful one – despite the title, this is not a smug couple fest, it’s genuine and astonished, her writing on writing, and her dog, Rose. I will ‘fess up: I skipped the chapter about her bookstore, not because I don’t trust her opinion, I just cannot deal with any kind of commentary on the publishing/bookselling industry’s future anymore. I have reached my absolute limit and get slightly ill even thinking about it.
The rest of this collection I hoovered up, with tremendous joy. She is self-effacing about this work in her introduction, but there’s no need: it’s a first rate set of writing.
Cannonball Read V 