{"id":425,"date":"2007-09-07T19:15:51","date_gmt":"2007-09-07T23:15:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2007\/09\/07\/ann-patchett-regrets\/"},"modified":"2007-09-07T19:15:51","modified_gmt":"2007-09-07T23:15:51","slug":"ann-patchett-regrets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2007\/09\/07\/ann-patchett-regrets\/","title":{"rendered":"Ann Patchett Regrets the Error"},"content":{"rendered":"

A friend sent me a link to the Atlantic<\/i> letter column<\/a>, where Ann Patchett apologizes to a Clemson undergrad for misquoting her in an article about how Truth and Beauty<\/i> sparked protests on campus<\/a>. What Amanda See had told the campus newspaper about her reaction to Patchett’s memoir, which recounts her friendship with Lucy Grealy, is that “the love between the two women is not normal,” and Patchett read that as “the love between two women.” As See points out, this “changes the entire meaning of the quote from a specific reference to the unhealthy nature of the friendship between Patchett and Lucy Grealy portrayed in the book to a blanket statement against lesbianism.” And in her misreading, Patchett took that opportunity to argue that See “had finally come out and said the thing that no one else had the nerve to mention: Lucy and I must have been having sex with each other.”<\/p>\n

All of which reminded me of one of my earliest blog entries, commenting on Janet Maslin’s review of the book<\/a>, where I flat out asked, “What exactly is Maslin trying to suggest about Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy?” Because that review was exactly the sort of thing Patchett was talking about—dancing around the subject in coy, voyeuristic language.<\/p>\n

(Now that she’s clear on what See really said, Patchett notes, “I am glad to know that See does not stand in judgment of lesbians, but I still find it troubling that she sees herself fit to publicly judge the normalcy of the deep love my friend Lucy Grealy and I shared.”)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A friend sent me a link to the Atlantic letter column, where Ann Patchett apologizes to a Clemson undergrad for misquoting her in an article about how Truth and Beauty sparked protests on campus. What Amanda See had told the campus newspaper about her reaction to Patchett’s memoir, which recounts her friendship with Lucy Grealy, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}