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 Autobiography of a Face :: 0060569662
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| 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 Editorial Descriptions are usually submitted by the manufacturers, publishers and authors. Contact us if you are one of them, and wish to change the above description. |
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Author: Guest
This book contains the memoirs of Lucy Grealy, who survived a deadly childhood cancer, only to have to learn to deal with others' reactions to her severely deformed face. When Grealy was 9 years old, she was diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma, which necessitated immediate surgery to remove a large portion of her jaw, where the tumor was growing. Following the surgery, she endured several years of radiation and chemotherapy. One of the ideas that kept her going through the ordeal was that one day, her hair would grow back, and life would get back to normal. But by the time her hair grew back, her jaw, or what was left of it, was way out of proportion for her face. Subsequent plastic surgeries were not able to create an ordinary-looking jaw for her, so she had to go through life with a devastating disfigurement that could not be hidden from others.
Grealy is an exceptional writer. She creates powerful images of her childhood experiences, taking the reader into the mind of someone with a severe disability-a disability that society reviles rather than treats with sympathy. She became aware of the necessity to stand alone at a very young age and developed her own strength to live independently. This is a remarkable book whose story will stay with you for years to come.
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Author: Guest
Grealy suffered from terminal cancer that repeatedly caused her jaw to be absorbed into face over the course of her life, starting from age 9. All this medical trauma makes for a great premise, but it is Grealy's lyrical, poetic writing that truly makes this book. Grealy manages to portray cancer and her medical trauma from the point-of-view of a nine-year-old. As a child, she never knew she had cancer, or what the outcome of any particular operation would be. Doctors would say things like "intubation" to the young Grealy and she would be shocked when they later showed up to shove a tube down her throat. She quickly learned not to trust any medical professionals, and her experience could educate a lot of people on how sick children should be treated and involved in their medical procedures.
Grealy moves into her adult life and gives the reader an inside glimpse at the life of someone who "looks different." One might wonder why Grealy went through so many agonizing procedures with small chances of success, but reading this book, the reader feels her constant pain and need to try to improve her appearance.
Anyone who enjoyed Grealy's memoir should pick up the companion follow-up, Ann Patchett's Truth & Beauty: A Friendship. Patchett writes about many of Grealy's surgeries and experiences from the outside view as her best friend (it is odd that Grealy never mentioned Patchett in her memoir, but Patchett dedicated an entire book to their friendship). Patchett provides a bigger picture of this troubled and charismatic woman, and the sum of the two books is greater than their parts. Together, they portray a fascinating woman (Grealy) and the way she interacted with the outside world, whether she was seen as lovable and free-spirited or high-maintenance and overdramatic.
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Author: Guest
Although it is true, according to so many who knew Lucy Grealy, that she is spoiled and selfish, it is also true that this book is excellent and thoughtfully written.
Most memoirs most likely leave certain elements out or elaborate others. In Grealy's case, though, she left behind so many people who really had bad personal experiences with her, that there are a lot of people to dispute or criticize her, as well.
That said, even if she was a selfish and spoiled woman, this book is STILL good. It is easy to see, with what she went through, why she became so needy. At such a young age, her self-image was distorted. I think anyone who went through that would be the same. I'm reminded, now, of Frances Kuffel's "Passing for Thin". The criticism of that book was similar to this. She grew up terribly obese, taunted and teased also. And, she had to relearn things the rest of us take for granted when she grew up. Grealy learned everything through such negative experiences, also.
Lucy Grealy considered herself a poet first, then a memoirist. Her memoir reads like poetry and the words she chooses to use serve her well.
After reading this, I read Ann Patchett's "Truth and Beauty" to get a fuller picture of Grealy. Ann's book talked about many things that Grealy's left out. Some reviewers seemed to find this troublesome. I don't think that is the point, however. Grealy shared with us her thoughts and feelings, not Ann Patchett's. Sometimes they were contradictory to Patchett's. Sometimes they were contradictory to her own thoughts at different times. This doesn't make them false; it makes her more real.
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Author: Guest
Do not misunderstand this review's title: it is not an apology, but rather a defense of what I consider to be one of the most hauntingly beautiful, well-crafted memoirs written in the last fifty years. Writing an autobiography of any kind is full of pitfalls--lapses into solipsism, half-truths, egoistical blathering--which Grealy avoids without even making the reader aware of her dexterity.
"Are you crazy?" critics of Grealy's work may ask. "The book is full of self-pity, lies and self-absorption." Descriptions I read of encounters with Grealy after she became a literary notable would certainly seem to validate these judgments.
But if the reader evaluates her memoir with the sensitivity and intellectual rigor it demands, the reader discovers that Grealy is not whiny at all. If she vacillates in her judgment of herself, if she shows us the tortuous feelings of self-pity and ugliness she felt, she is at the same time showing us an honest portrait of a human being in all its contradictory glory. Does the reader expect Grealy to act unaffected by the taunts of her peers, the pain of chemo treatments, the pain of knowing she will never be given what she wants? Who wouldn't have indulged the fantasies she did, considering her age and the severity of her condition? Has any one of us, her readers, undergone such unremitting physical and emotional pain?
As for Grealy's supposed detachment, we might say such distance is both necessary and understandable, considering when she wrote the memoir. Wordsworth noted that poetry, which I think applies to Grealy's work (I'm paraphrasing), is "an emotion recollected in tranquillity"--not while the passions are churning, but after the fact, when the writer can calmly assess the feelings and their significance. Grealy's memoir is written by an adult, not a child. Although she skillfully takes the reader back to her childhood emotions, she maintains an authorial distance that looks at the pain without succumbing to it over and over again. We wouldn't want her to do otherwise.
I encourage critics to read her autobiography again, or for the first time, with an open mind more sensitive to the intimate lyricism with which Grealy recounts her early life. Perhaps her subsequent struggles (with drugs, with fame) rub against us because we believe she should have led a more blameless life. But as Grealy shows us in her memoir, she was never different from anyone else: she was always just as imperfect, and beautiful, as we are.
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Author: Guest
As seen in Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett, Lucy Grealy is a selfish spoiled girl. Her main concern in this book is not how to live with the disfigurement from cancer, but how to make people do things to make her happy. She learns to work the system to get what she wants. There's no great introspection in her story. She has no startling insights about life. She just goes along from surgery to surgery begging for attention and love while not giving anything back to others. The most interesting thing in the book was the mention of early drug abuse with painkillers from surgery and how she dismissed it as nothing important.
And I also noticed how she never mentioned Ann Patchett in this book. If Ann was such a wonderful friend and the only person to understand Lucy, why did she not appear in this story? Many other people are included, from her first lover to her horse's caretaker. It's fascinating to see how life and memories are rewritten after the fact.
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