What happens when the person you promise to love and to honour for the rest of your life is not your lover, but your best friend? In her frank and startlingly intimate first work of non-fiction, Ann Patchett shines light on the little explored world of women's friendships and shows us what it means to stand together. Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981 and after enrolling in the Iowa Writer's Workshop began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work. In her critically acclaimed and hugely successful memoir, Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy wrote about the first half of her life: losing part of her jaw to childhood cancer, the years of chemotherapy and radiation, and then the endless reconstructive surgeries. In Truth and Beauty, the story isn't Lucy's life or Ann's life, but the parts of their lives they shared together. This is a portrait of unwavering commitment that spans twenty years, from the long cold winters of the Midwest, to surgical wards, to book parties in New York...