Since "The Patron Saint of Liars" in 1992, Ann Patchett has won increasing acclaim for her wonderful novels.

	"TRUTH AND BEAUTY" By Ann Patchett HarperCollins ($23.95)

Her most recent, "Bel Canto," won the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Prize as well as the Orange Prize in Britain. Whether writing about opera singers, magicians, terrorists, or ordinary people, Patchett inevitably is concerned with the triumph of relationship -- of love in all its forms -- and of the transformative power of art.

Her new book is not a novel but a memoir. Subtitled "A Friendship," it describes Patchett's 20-year relationship with the writer Lucy Grealy, and it is her most resonant and impassioned love story yet.

Patchett and Grealy met as graduate students at the prestigious University of Iowa Writers Workshop, where they shared a classically dingy little apartment. From the beginning, Lucy was no ordinary roommate.

Diagnosed with jaw cancer at 9, she endured five years of brutal radiation and chemotherapy, followed by a series of largely unsuccessful reconstructive surgeries.

Her jaw was small and misformed, and she had only her top teeth. They were oddly matched roommates:

Patchett, the fiction writer, was orderly, tidy, diligent. Grealy, the poet, was an exuberant, unorganized mess.

As Patchett tells it, Grealy taught her to dance, both literally and figuratively.

At Iowa, Grealy had transformed herself from an androgynous gamine into a tiny, sexy young woman, her face less relevant when she wore short skirts and high heels.

Patchett narrates these years as her own "Portrait of the Artists as Young Women," describing the two of them furiously writing, talking, drinking, Lucy, especially, looking desperately for love in sexual relationships.

"Iowa City in the eighties was never going to be Paris in the twenties," Patchett writes, "but we gave it our best shot."

As the years passed, both women started their serious work as starving artists. Patchett compares their styles to Aesop's fables of the ant and the grasshopper, and the tortoise and the hare.

Ann was, as usual, the diligent ant, the slow and steady tortoise, while Lucy was the hare, the grasshopper, procrastinating till the last moment of a deadline, constantly in debt, in and out of relationships.

The women were separated many times, winning fellowships, residencies and teaching jobs in different places, Lucy in and out of the hospital for surgical procedures to salvage her disintegrating jaw, but they were in constant contact through letters.

In 1994, Grealy turned to nonfiction, using the material of her life for a treatise on self-image. "Autobiography of a Face" won her legions of fans, many of them cancer survivors.

Patchett is careful to note, however, that Grealy's "cancer and subsequent suffering had not made this book. She had made it. Her intellect and ability were in every sense larger than the disease."

And it is that same impulse towards art that makes "Truth and Beauty" so compelling. Patchett and Grealy were not just friends; they are both extraordinary writers, capable of articulating the intricacies of their attachment.

Grealy ultimately went through 38 different surgeries, each time hoping she would get a beautiful face, and each time facing a different sort of disappointment as the reconstructions failed and her overall health declined. As her fame grew, her despair increased.

She began using first OxyContin and later heroin, and her death in 2002 was ruled a probable drug overdose.

This sort of story has the potential to be anything from self-serving to sentimental to depressing, but Patchett avoids all of these.

Rather it is a radically honest treatise on friendship, the playful, awful communion of two lives. She observes:

"Grasshoppers and hares find the ants and tortoises. They need us to survive, but we need them as well. They were the ones who brought the truth and beauty to the party, which, Lucy could tell you as she recited her Keats over breakfast, was better than food any day."