"Allan had been my most important teacher in college. He was the person who had taught me to write. Now he was there in the living room in Aberdeen in his bow tie, calmly discussing his life as a writer. I was exhausted and running a fever. By the orange coiled light of the electric heater I felt like I was having a visitation from the Angel of Fiction. I decided then and there that I would be like Lucy (her friend). I would be like Allan. I vowed that I would write my way into another life. I, too, would try for everything."
~Ann Patchett, from her book "Truth & Beauty, a friendship"
"Angel of Fiction" I love that. I also love "write my way into another life" That is a great intrigue about writing to me. The idea of writing your way into or out of anything really, whether real or imaginary. Although, I think the therapeutic element is in writing yourself through situations and feelings.
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At this moment I'm wondering and concerned about where we will be living in a month. It's a time of change, uprooting, and uncertainty. Adam wrote about the mindset of too much mind and not enough heart.
Hello.
Of course I need my analytical, list-making, rational mind in the whole house-hunting and the possible necessity of finding temporary housing until then; but I have been lacking in the dreamer side of imagining possibilities of a new home, in a new area. Move over mind, my heart needs to be invited in the process too! I'm not sure where I'm going here....but I like this quote:
"Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens." ~Carl Jung
More later.
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"Truth & Beauty" Product description from Amazon
Ann Patchett and the late 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 Grealy's critically acclaimed memoir, Autobiography of a Face, she wrote about losing part of her jaw to childhood cancer, years of chemotherapy and radiation, and endless reconstructive surgeries. In Truth & Beauty, the story isn't Lucy's life or Ann's life, but the parts of their lives they shared. This is a portrait of unwavering commitment that spans twenty years, from the long winters of the Midwest, to surgical wards, to book parties in New York. Through love, fame, drugs, and despair, this is what it means to be part of two lives that are intertwined ... and what happens when one is left behind.
This is a tender, brutal book about loving the person we cannot save. It is about loyalty, and being lifted up by the sheer effervescence of someone who knew how to live life to the fullest.
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