Good friends: Finding community as a Catholic woman can be life changing.

When Ann Patchett wrote the memoir Truth & Beauty (Harper Perennial) about her 17-year friendship with brilliant, troubled Lucy Grealy, Clemson University students protested Patchett's visit because of false assumptions that the two best friends were lesbians. Patchett's sister joked that if the book had been about two men, it would have been the next Brian's Song and Clemson would have named the football stadium after her. The literature of friendship-from Aristotle and Cicero to the 12th-century monk Aelred of Rievaulx to the 16th-century essayist Michel de Montaigne to C. S. Lewis-often implies (or, like Montaigne, says outright) that women aren't fit for such bonds. [Extracted from the article]

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