Ann Patchett’s Closest Friends—From College and Lifelong Bonds to Brief Meaningful Friendships

Ann Patchett has penned some of the most real, raw and profound friendships in her works over the years. While some of the details have been drawn from her own personal experiences, such as the bond between her and Lucy Grealy in her memoir, Truth & Beauty: A Friendship, Patchett often explores the complexity and emotion of friendship in her fictional works. 

“I am all about female friendship,” Patchett once shared. “It’s been the specialty of my life. I spent 12 years in a girls’ school, I went to Sarah Lawrence (which had about a dozen male students back when I was there), my mother, my grandmother, my sister, my girlfriends, these are the central relationships of my life.”

Patchett finds friendships to be unburdened and authentic love stories that allow for the messy, unfiltered parts of yourself to be exposed. This view on friends has led to the author’s deep exploration of her own friendships both on the page and in real life, never holding back on those deep bonds.  Learn more about the people who have impacted Patchett’s life, from lifelong friendships to brief but precious ties. 

Elizabeth McCracken

In 1990, Patchett met one of her closest friends, Elizabeth McCracken, and their meeting is one right out of a movie. While attending the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts as a fellow, Patchett began knocking on the apartment doors in hopes of finding a friend. After there was no answer at three or four, someone finally swung their door open.

“I said, ‘Do you want to be my friend?’ I was pathetic, I mean, ‘Do you want to go have ice cream?’” Patchett recalled. McCracken then added, “We drove to Ben and Jerry’s and discussed our mutual hatred of Kevin Costner.”

It wasn’t long before Patchett and McCracken (author of The Giant’s House) formed a deep bond, relying on each other for writing critiques and as each other’s trusted manuscript readers. Patchett taught McCracken how to drive while she watched Patchett write her very first novel. 

Their friendship has continued to grow over the years, with both writers supporting each other’s endeavors, including the opening of Patchett’s Nashville bookstore, Parnassus Books.

Lucy Grealy

Lucy Grealy and Ann Patchett’s long and lasting friendship was one that began years before Patchett ever published her first book. The long-time friends first met while attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City, though their paths crossed unknowingly even earlier. Both writers had attended Sarah Lawrence College at the same time, though they didn’t know each other then. 

Then, in 1985, the two became roommates in Iowa City and their bond was instant. Patchett wrote of their friendship and how they met in her memoir, Truth & Beauty: A Friendship.

“I do not remember our love unfolding, that we got to know one another and in time became friends,” Patchett wrote. “I only remember that she came through the door and it was there, huge and permanent and first.”

Both friends found great success as writers, but while Ann continued with her writing career, Grealy )author of Autobiography of a Face) dealt with the aftermath of childhood cancer that left her with chronic pain, emotional trauma and an eventual drug addiction. Grealy unfortunately died of a heroin overdose in December 2002 at age 39. Patchett later detailed their friendship and bond in her 2004 memoir. 

“Our friendship was like our writing in some ways,” Patchett shared. “It was the only thing that was interesting about our otherwise dull lives. We were better off when we were together.”

Sooki Raphael

Although their friendship was cut short, Patchett and Sooki Raphael shared a deep and meaningful friendship. In 2017, Patchett was asked to moderate a live interview with Tom Hanks as he was promoting his short story collection, Uncommon Type. While waiting in the wings of the Washington D.C. theater to go on, Patchett encountered Hanks’ personal assistant, Raphael.

“The assistant was a tiny woman wearing a fitted black-velvet evening coat embroidered with saucer-size peonies,” Patchett wrote of their meeting. “‘Such a beautiful coat,’ I said to her. We’d been introduced when I arrived but I didn’t remember her name.”

The two only briefly chatted that night, but when Patchett asked Hanks to narrate her novel, The Dutch House, it led to a correspondence between Raphael and herself. Soon enough, Raphael informed Patchett that she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and their correspondence grew into a friendship. Although she was in remission, the cancer later returned and Raphael was looking into clinical trials. 

When she was accepted into a Nashville-based trial, with the help of Patchett’s husband, a doctor at Vanderbilt, Patchett insisted that Raphael stay in their basement apartment as opposed to a hotel. Her brief stay turned into much more, as the COVID-19 pandemic had just hit and lockdown ensued. 

Patchett later wrote about her friendship with Raphael in a 2021 essay, ‘These Precious Days,’ which was shared in Harper’s Magazine just a few months before she died from pancreatic cancer. 

“Everything was tremendously present tense for Sooki,” Patchett later shared of her friend. “We talked about what we were going to make for dinner. We talked about what we were reading and what we wanted to accomplish that day. And we were living exactly in the moment.”