I just finished Ann Patchett's Truth & Beauty, a love letter of a memoir. It is the companion book to one of my favorite nonfiction reads: Autobiography of a Face by the late and brilliant Lucy Grealy. I had been meaning to read Patchett's account of her alternately loving and codependent friendship with Grealy for many years. Truth & Beauty confronts the same themes as my play EXPATRIATE: creativity, friendship, sudden fame, addiction, sexuality and death. On the beautiful paperback cover: a mighty dazzling grasshopper, showing off above a voluptuous but missable ant. So many pairs like this: the born genius and the tireless worker. How compelling their love.