for the past week or so, i’ve been listening to Ann Patchett’s Truth & Beauty: A Friendship. it’s a book she wrote about her friendship with poet Lucy Grealy. Grealy, whose Autobiography of a Face i read last month for my book club, affected me quite a bit, though i did not particularly enjoy the book. i thought Grealy’s prose was a little cold and removed, i wanted more emotion, more passion, more heartbreak. i’m sort of a greedy reader like that. i want to get into the muckity muck of it all.

listening to Patchett’s book is breaking my heart. Patchett spends a lot of time talking about Lucy’s loneliness. She talks about how nothing seemed to fill that void in Lucy– not a phenomenally successful book, not lovers, not trainloads of friends, not national fame, nothing seemed to abate Lucy’s loneliness. this void in Lucy’s life could only be filled by the love of a man, or so she thought. it terrifies me a little, that i see so much of myself in Lucy.

Lucy was just so lonely. Patchett talks about how Lucy would weep she was so lonely. how nothing ever seemed to be enough. she talked of how Lucy needed constant reassurance that Patchett loved her, how Lucy needed this reassurance from everyone in her life. it seems as though even Patchett, Lucy’s best friend, would grow tired of reassuring her.

it makes my hands shake a little when i think about it, because i know how Lucy feels. how it just seems that nobody will ever love you, though you have friends and family that love you endlessly and without restraint, it just doesn’t seem enough. it makes me wonder what is enough. will there ever be enough? Lucy died in 2002 of a drug overdose. the pain of her face, her inability to write, what have you, lead to a drug problem that did her in.

i listened to the part about Lucy’s death in the parking lot of my apartment building. i couldn’t turn it off. i couldn’t move. i was covered in tears, completely heartbroken over the writer who died penniless and alone. i just worry that it could so very easily be me. and i don’t want to be that person who never has enough.