Maslin Watch: Revisiting a Prior Thesis

I have it on reliable authority that I was, in fact, reading too much into the passages from Truth and Beauty Maslin quoted in her review. Though the friendship between Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy depicted in the book was affectionately intimate, a reader who knew them both informs me it was not sexual. "Lucy was a tremendously physical and physically affectionate person, like a preteen girl," she observes. "As Ann has said, she got cancer at 10, and there were parts of her personality that stuck at 10-years-old. She was very good at demanding love, by which I mean she demanded a lot and she always got it."

That's thoroughly consistent with the excerpts Maslin and Oates quoted and Patchett's original New York article--and, on reflection, even as I was raising questions about the review's dancing around the issue, the relationship sounded a lot more like schoolgirl crush than love affair. I might not even have paid it as much mind had I not noticed a similar coyness on Maslin's part in an earlier review.