Product Description
"I spent five years of my life being treated for cancer, but since then I've spent fifteen years being treated for nothing other than looking different from everyone else. It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly, that I always viewed as the great tragedy of my life. The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison." At age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer. When she returned to school with a third of her jaw removed, she faced the cruel taunts of classmates. In this strikingly candid memoir, Grealy tells her story of great suffering and remarkable strength without sentimentality and with considerable wit. Vividly portraying the pain of peer rejection and the guilty pleasures of wanting to be special, Grealy captures with unique insight what it is like as a child and 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.
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Amazon.com Review
At age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer. When she returned to school with a third of her jaw removed, she faced the cruel taunts of classmates. In this strikingly candid memoir, Grealy tells her story of great suffering and remarkable strength without sentimentality and with considerable wit. Vividly portraying the pain of peer rejection and the guilty pleasure of wanting to be special, Grealy captures with unique insight what it is like as a child and 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
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 Straightforward Account on Cancer and Social Isolation ( littlewriter )
Books about dealing with and/or surviving cancer number in the thousands, as do their recurrent themes of life affirmation, love and mortality. However, none are so concentrated on self-acceptance and the value of physical beauty as renowned poet Lucy Grealy's 1994 memoir "Autobiography of a Face".
Grealy's memoir traces her life from early childhood all the way to her college years and tracks the painful progression, recovery and aftermath of her illness. Grealy was afflicted with Ewing's sarcoma, a rare cancer that is found in the bones or soft tissues. Only six years old when a malignancy began forming in her jaw and nine when she was officially diagnosed, Lucy underwent several procedures as a result, including a radical surgery that ended up disfiguring her jaw. While most girls her age were whispering of their first crushes on the playground, Lucy was frequenting Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and undergoing radiation and chemotherapy treatments, an excruciating process that robbed her of a normal childhood. Plagued by severe nausea, vomiting and extreme fatigue, Lucy lost a significant amount of weight as well as all of her hair. Barely surfing her teens, she was faced with the fragility of her mortality and the weird and embarrassing notion of wigs to cover her naked scalp, concepts to which a healthy pre-teen girl barely gives a thought. Grealy would go through almost thirty operations to reconstruct her face until finally a recommendation from her sister to Dr. Oliver Fenton in Scotland gave her a small semblance of her life back.
Grealy dealt for many years with a warped sense of self, the image reflected in mirrors and her own perceptions of people's reactions to her a platform for severe depression and a depleted self-esteem. The taunts and stares from classmates only made things worse and Lucy got little respite from her misery save for her many retreats to the hospital and her recovery times from numerous surgeries. She says of her physical countenance, "When I tried to imagine being beautiful, I could only imagine living without the perpetual fear of being alone, without the great burden of isolation, which is what feeling ugly felt like." (pg. 177) Grealy more than demonstrates through her retrospection that American culture is utterly consumed by the distortion of female beauty and as a result young girls continuously and methodically fall prey to low self-esteem, poor body image, eating disorders and drug addiction.
Though she found solace in her friendships in college and her work as a writer and poet, Grealy harbored many demons and her problems with substance abuse began with codeine, a painkiller she purposely abused to numb her mind and body. What is not documented here is her eventual dependence and abuse of OxyContin, a painkiller with such a euphoric power that it eventually opened a door to heroin. Grealy met a dark end at the age of 39, her ongoing drug addictions and her underlying depression resulting in an accidental overdose and her subsequent death in December of 2002.
One of the most valuable messages to take from Grealy's memoir is that far too many of us seek perfection on the outside while the inside is forgotten, left behind and veiled by a decorative shell deemed acceptable by society. While the vast majority of us bemoan our dimpled thighs, our cellulite-ridden derriers, our small breasts and sagging complexions, Grealy merely longed for a life unblemished by physical and emotional disfigurement. Too often we need to be reminded of how lucky we truly are and Grealy's poignant and personal account is a significant paradigm for the masses.
Bottom line: A mournful but gripping chronicle of transcendent suffering, "Autobiography Of A Face" will echo long after the grave silencing of Grealy's voice.
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Autobiography of a Face Review ( stoney1086 )
Lucy Grealy tells a beautiful story in the autobiography titled Autobiography of a Face. The story begins positively with Lucy's migration from Ireland to the United States with her parents and two obnoxious brothers. Her brother's were disgusted with the American culture while Lucy embraced it. Life seemed to be going extremely well for Lucy until one day at recess. She collided with another student in the middle of recess. She experienced constant excruciating pain in her mouth afterward. The doctors diagnosed her tooth primarily. Once the pain continued and the doctors looked deeper, they found a much larger problem. Lucy had accumulated bone cancer in her jaw. The late detection of the tumor caused difficulty in treatment. The options were so limited that Lucy's face was to endure the worst side effect. The book talks about how Lucy spends the rest of her life in inner turmoil with herself. She loses a lot of self confidence at an early age and even attempts suicide at the age of 30. Lucy talks about how she spent a lot her life hiding, whether it was in the horse barn or in the guidance counselor's office during lunch. It isn't until later in life that Lucy grasps the true meaning of beauty and can live in peace.
I thought the book was extremely well written and definitely enjoyed it. Lucy Grealy's perspective gives a very personal account that intrigues the reader. It had more of an emotional aspect opposed to an informative one. I did however learn a lot about tissue transfer to the face that I didn't know before. When reading the story, you can truly feel Lucy's pain. My favorite part was when she talked about how she reached a point of realization that she was in her sickness alone. She talked about how even though she had so much support around her, she would have to overcome the disease physically and emotionally entirely alone. Once Lucy was able to get over this aspect, she was able to manage her sickness.
I'm glad I picked Autobiography of a Face because it gave me a different outlook on cancer. I had always thought of cancer as a difficult disease, but I had always assumed with such great awareness and technology the treatment was an easy road. The book talked about how when you are first diagnosed everyone comes running to the rescue. It talked about how the months after the shock are actually the hardest. Once everyone is over the shock and moving on with their lives, you are left alone. With the treatment being so expensive Lucy's parents were forced to go back to work. You always think that cancer patients have so much attention and so many people helping them through things. I related this to when my grandmother had cancer. I remember everyone coming to her rescue in the first few months she was diagnosed. After she began treatment and things seemed to be getting better,Grandma fell of the radar. After reading the book, I regret not calling Grandma in the later months that could've been her hardest.
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The Realities of Life from Underneath a Blindfold
As a child, it is normal to be self-conscious and to examine ones every flaw, even if they appear perfect to others. The world will always hold things better than one's own, and there will always be ways to be envious of others in the search to be perfect or at least "normal."
Diagnosed with Ewing's Sarcoma, a cancer that quickly pecked away at her jaw, Lucy Grealy reveals the internal struggle in all of us to be accepted and loved. Leading the reader into an open-minded yet naïve nine year olds diagnosis, Lucy weaves a spider web of emotions with her language as she grows, and as her jaw shrinks. The reader soon becomes engulfed in a world of hospitals, a child's mind, and a scarred and grafted confidence. In one hospital stay, she describes the cries and movements of Beagles in a testing lab; "desperation saturated the room in those loud, whining cries pacing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. I was overwhelmed," (Grealy. 51). As I started to become entangled in reading that scene, I became her, clenching her body tightly as she walked down the endless rows of cages.
Grealy artfully sews each chapter of her adolescence into an enthralling memoir, with small, unforgettable memories and obscure details. Instead of cringing at what was to come, she explored it with the tenacity and curiosity of an adolescent. She weaves metaphors and recalls times in which her growing mind went astray. For instance, during radiation treatment, Lucy explains that after she had been told to take a breath, "...as deeply as I could, almost always thinking about a movie I'd seen, a maritime disaster in which the hero had to swim a long distance underwater in order to save everyone else. I held my breath along with him..." (Grealy, 71). Although, hidden underneath these dark, yet clever statements was a person struggling with being not physically "up-to-par" with society's standards. Lucy matures in the novel, and in one later chapter, she elucidates the reality of how self-conscious she really was. Leaving an imprint in how I look at myself, she "...started focusing on the upcoming date, believing that my life would finally get started once I had the face I was `supposed' to have," (Grealy, 179). When she states that, I felt a pang through my own teenage angst. She believed that she could never accept her face, and that no one would unless it was socially acceptable. Lucy Grealy pries open the secret fears in all of us, as she leads a life seeking to just be out of the shadows of society's ignorance.
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The Review of a Face
Lucy Grealy's memoir, Autobiography of a Face follows her story of a young girl starting at about age ten and her struggle with dealing with serious cancer that infected her jaw and the painful surgery that reconstructs her face. Her writing is poetic like and pretty. I was also very amused and found many parts of her writing funny. "I wasn't particularly thrilled with the wired-shut [broken jaw] part, but I was too involved with the idea of venturing off to a hospital emergency room to think much about it. My two absolute favorite programs television programs were Emergency and Medical Center" (20). Grealy manages to keep a pretty light tone throughout her memoir considering her the serious situation that followed most of her life. Her humor kept me chuckling to myself throughout most of the book, even through more serious parts.
That's not to say that at times I did not feel her heartbreaking emotions at certain points in this overall sad novel. "Outside of school I'd catch adults staring at me all the time. I played games with them in stores, positioning myself just so...and trap them as they averted their embarrassed stares. Groups of boys were what I most feared, I ducked into an empty doorway..." (141). When I read this passage I truly felt horrible for Lucy. Throughout the memoir I felt bad for everything her cancer put her through, all the hospital visits and weakening medicine and treatments she went on. But for some reason this passage was truly heart wrenching for me because I saw all the precaution steps and methods she had for just dealing with just a simple trip to a drugstore and walk down a school hallway.
I think that one of the main reasons Lucy wrote this novel was to show that even through her obviously hard and painful battle with cancer, Lucy had a truly exciting and lively life. All though she spent a lot of her childhood in hospitals she still is vibrant and young. She definitely gets her message across that she was a survivor at heart.
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 Mirror, Mirror on the Wall...Go Away ( lamalo11 )
With great description and vivid detail, Lucy Grealy explains the traumatic effects of living with cancer treatments and a crooked jaw line in her memoir, The Autobiography of a Face. Grealy reveals her inner thoughts of self-consciousness in her everyday interactions, portraying how even a simple conversation can provoke great anxiety: "Out of nowhere came an intense feeling that he shouldn't be looking at me, that I was too horrible to look at, that I wasn't worthy of being looked at, that my ugliness was equal to a great personal failure" (185). Though most people can connect with having been self-conscious at one point in their lives, Grealy lives with the torment daily, avoiding mirrors and trying to overcome the frustration.
Though she writes in past tense speaking in a conversational tone, she occasionally speaks from her present self, referring to times such as "years later." Readers may either feel relieved that there is a resolved ending or frustrated at the break in character: "Some years later, I don't remember exactly how many, as my family was milling about the kitchen and I was leafing through the paper at the table, someone dated an event as something that had happened `before Lucy had cancer'" (43). The two headed narrator allows us to understand that her current self is still not undergoing cancer and acts as a pause from her younger voice.
Grealy's extended period of time in a hospital has allowed for great observation using the senses: "The smells and sounds were so familiar--the sweet disinfectant and wax, always an aroma of overcooked food in the background, the metallic clinks of IV poles as they were pushed along the floor on their stands" (183). By giving distinct imagery and specific examples, readers can picture themselves accompanying her through her journey. The powerful imagery parallels the powerful emotions. Her captivating descriptions of the treatments and obstacles of ugliness and death brought me to tears. The stirring story spills out onto the paper using the literary techniques of a two headed narrator and poignant descriptions. By drawing us into her memoir, we understand the significance of self-image and the appreciation of survival.
Karin Lavie
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