It is not the kind of question one answers quickly or without reservation, but it is a question that deserves a thoughtful answer. She captures what it is like as a child and a young adult to be torn between two warring impulses: to feel that more than anything else we want to be loved for who we are, while wishing desperately and secretly to be perfect.Near the end of Anne Fadiman’s book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, a tragic account of two cultures at odds with each other, she tells the story of a Hmong patient who was being referred to a specialist for further treatment, and instead of inquiring about the physician’s skill or credentials, he asked, “Do you know someone who would care for me and love me”? (Fadiman 1997) It is an honest question that bears asking, and yet in all its naked simplicity lays the deepest complexity. In this lyrical and strikingly candid memoir, Grealy tells her story of great suffering and remarkable strength without sentimentality and with considerable wit. It took her twenty years of living with a distorted self-image and more than thirty years of reconstructive procedures before she could come to terms with her appearance. When she returned to school with a third of her jaw removed, she faced the cruel taunts of classmates.
In this celebrated memoir and exploration of identity, cancer transforms the author's face, childhood, and the rest of her life.Īt age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer. "It is impossible to read Autobiography of a Face without having your consciousness raised forever." - Mirabella Grealy has turned her misfortune into a book that is engaging and engrossing, a story of grace as well as cruelty, and a demonstration of her own wit and style and class.- Washington Post Book World Her discovery that true beauty lies within makes this a wise and healing book. No longer eligible for medical coverage, she moved to London to take advantage of Britain's socialized medicine, and underwent a 13-hour operation in Scotland.
During graduate school at the University of Iowa, she had a series of unsatisfying sexual affairs, hoping to prove she was lovable. At Sarah Lawrence College in the mid-1980s, she discovered poetry as a vehicle for her pent-up emotions. Extremely self-conscious and shy, Grealy endured insults and ostracism as a teenager in Spring Valley, N.Y.
This harrowing, lyrical autobiographical memoir, which grew out of an award-winning article published in Harper's in 1993, is a striking meditation on the distorting effects of our culture's preoccupation with physical beauty. "Diagnosed at age nine with Ewing's sarcoma, a cancer that severely disfigured her face, Grealy lost half her jaw, recovered after two and half years of chemotherapy and radiation, then underwent plastic surgery over the next 20 years to reconstruct her jaw.
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