A Heartbreaking Need for Jesus

Don’t misunderstand my title. Everyone needs Jesus to the same degree—absolutely. However, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the need so painfully manifested in a human being before as I saw it in Lucy Grealy as recounted in Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty.

Truth and Beauty is the story of the friendship between novelist, Ann Patchett, and poet/writer Lucy Grealy. They were nominal acquaintances at Sarah Lawerence and later became best friends when they roomed together while in graduate school at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Grealy was disfigured from childhood cancer, and during her life she underwent thirty-eight operations in an attempt to reconstruct her face. Despite her disfigurement, Grealy was extremely charismatic and popular, and she was incredibly intelligent. She had a considerable number of friends who loved her and put up with behavior that would have prompted many people to give up on her early in a friendship. She published a book, Autobiography of a Face, to tremendous acclaim and subsequent financial success.

However, despite all that she had going for her, she was obsessed with wanting to be pretty and for others to love her. She would ask her friends continually if they loved her, and she constantly talked of being lonely and wanting to be loved by a man. She was promiscuous to a degree that caused me to marvel that she didn’t end up with STDs and AIDS. At the end of her life, she was addicted to heroin. She died penniless and estranged from many of her friends who no longer knew how to help her. Following is a passage describing her sense of loneliness:

Lucy’s loneliness was breathtaking in its enormity. If she emptied out Grand Central Station and filled it with the people she knew well, the people who loved her, there would be more than a hundred people there. But a hundred people in such a huge space just rattle around. You could squeeze us all into a single bar. With some effort you could push us into a magazine shop. If you added to that number all of the people that loved her because of her book, all the people who admired her, all the people who had heard her speak or had seem her on television or listened to her on the radio and loved the sound of her odd little voice, you could pack in thousands and thousands more people, and still it wouldn’t feel full, not full enough to take up every square inch of her loneliness. Lucy thought that all she needed was one person, the right person, and all the empty space would be taken away from her. But there was no one in the world who was big enough for that. (Emphasis mine.)

Lucy did need only one Person, and there is only one Person in the world who is big enough to have met Lucy’s need.

The title of the book is based on a passage early in the story wherein Patchett allude's to Keats's “Ode to a Grecian Urn”:

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

How different Grealy’s life would have been, had she come to know the Truth (John 14:6).