Autobiography of a Face | 
| Author: Lucy Grealy
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Category: Book
List Price: $12.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  89 reviews
Sales Rank: 14671
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.3 x 0.8
ISBN: 0060569662
Dewey Decimal Number: 362.1969947160092
EAN: 9780060569662
ASIN: 0060569662
Publication Date: March 18, 2003
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Amazon.com
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
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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| Customer Reviews: Read 84 more reviews...
 Lucy overcomes extreme adversity at a young age March 29, 2008
I originally had to read this book for a school project, and I wasn't expecting much since I usually don't find non fiction very interesting. But this book wasn't bad, it was pretty good. This girl Lucy, at nine, crashes into another kid's head playing a game during recess, and her face begins to hurt way more than it should and then swells up. She goes to the doctor and she finds out she has a tumor in her jaw, and that its cancerous. However, this book is really not about Lucy's cancer. It's about her life and the effect that the cancer has on it. At first, she really doesn't mind that much. She likes all the special attention that she is getting, and doesn't care what she looks like, even with one whole third of her jaw removed. Later however, she becomes very insecure about her face and becomes obsessed with multiple reconstructive surgeries that never work, convinced that she can never be loved with a face like hers. She finds it easier to spend time with the horses she works with at her high school job than with people. She eventually gets her face fixed (somewhat), but she thinks it's all wrong, that its not really her. I liked this because it was informative without being "whiney" and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys biographies about people overcoming adversity. It is also a good book for high school girls who are insecure about their looks, because it shows them how lucky they really are to be "whole". I suppose something like what happened to Lucy can really mess you up, but she comes out fine in the end because she learns how to deal with her appearance issues. It's a good book.
A Disembodied Work March 24, 2008
In Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy has written--not remembered-- a story based on her myriad attempts to attain a widely accepted form of physical beauty. (This is noted and emphasized in the book's Afterword by Ann Patchett, a longtime friend of Grealy's.) Why this fact is important to Grealy and, vicariously, to Patchett is explicitly stated: Grealy wanted to be appreciated for her writing, not for surviving what was certainly a hellish ordeal. What Patchett also makes clear in the Afterword (and in Truth & Beauty: A Friendship) is that Grealy's book was not made a bestseller due to her beautiful sentence struture. Nor was it due to some sweeping truth about life evidenced in what I must refer to as Grealy's novel. Instead, Autobiography of a Face sold well because people wanted to read about Grealy's pain. Real, remembered pain; not fictional pain. Real hospital visits, real operations, real life. The questions asked of Grealy at her readings make this obvious. By writing a fictionalized account of what happened, Grealy gave her fans a taste of what they wanted, a taste that they couldn't conceive of as fiction, because without that element of truth, the book falls apart.
Patchett claims that Autobiography should stand as great literature outside its voyeuristic appeal. Indeed, Lucy Grealy was an accomplished poet in her lifetime, a feat that very few can claim without some degree of nepotism or croneyism (although I'm sure the Iowa Writers' Workshop didn't hurt). Unfortunately, the beauty and elegance of form so easily found in her verse does not translate to her prose. Her sentences, while by no means awkward, are not stunning, not moving. She could be sitting with her peers, casually relating the events of her life-- but, as she insisted at the anecdotal reading Patchett describes in the Afterword, Autobiography is not an autobiography. It is fiction. And, as fiction, it is nothing more than a laundry list of voluntary tortures, all in the name of love (or sex, or acceptance, depending on the stage of the narrator's life). The climax, as it were, is but a comfortable murmur after a grotesque surgical storm.
Grealy's life story is phenomenal and heartbreaking, but only because the tale is her own. No fictional character can command our sympathies as readily as flesh and blood. For Grealy to insist that we judge her novel outside of its truth is for her to strip the book of its power-- to render it incomplete, a face struggling desperately to find a body.
 Autobiography of a Face January 27, 2008
a little wrinkled, but the text is what matters and it is a great read.... if you are into depressing stories....
Moving, engaging, darkly troubling, and inspiring - made me want to appreciate the simple joys of life January 9, 2008
IMPRESSIONS:
This was a good book, moving and engaging. Though you would think that it was the battle with cancer itself which would prove troublesome, perhaps because of the young age at which she underwent this struggle, we see that it the resulting effects are what truly impacted Grealy's life.
Her book is insightful even for those who have not had to undergo the extraordinary struggles that she faced. The desire to be loved and feel special, to want to stand out in a singular and unique way and yet not be ridiculed, but rather adored, the simple joy that comes from being able to look at someone and know that they are looking back and see you and know you and understand you, loving you all the while, these emotions run throughout this book and would echo with anyone who has not always felt loved or accepted, who has doubted their worthiness.
CRITICISMS:
I did find that Grealy's siblings were quite absent throughout her narrative. She had four siblings, one of them a fraternal twin, and I found it quite odd that we don't really see that much of them or are given very clear depictions of them - especially her twin sister, Sarah, since all of the twins I've known have always been extremely close with their sibling.
I also found her father's death kind of glossed over and was unable to understand the detachment with which it was written about. That she only visited her father once in the hospital while he was there for a few months seemed incomprehensible to me, but who am I to judge another's grief or how they display it? Grealy later writes of finally feeling the loss of her father, and the regret with which she writes of that moment when she lay in her hospital bed, pretending sleep, and he walked softly in, was very moving and could be acutely felt.
As some other reviewers have mentioned, however, the book is entitled "Autobiography of a Face," and that is what you are getting.
OF NOTE:
As I was writing this review, I was doing some research online and found out that Lucy Grealy passed away in 2002. Apparently, the brief drug dependency mentioned in passing in "Autobiography of a Face" reemerged later in life and led to a presumed accidental drug overdose. She was close friends with Ann Patchett, author of "Bel Canto," and there has been some controversy surrounding Patchett's 2004 memoir, "Truth & Beauty," which recounts the friendship of the two authors (apparently Grealy's family objects to Patchett's portrayal of her).
The article "Hijacked by grief," by Grealy's sister Suellen, which appeared in the August 7, 2004 edition of the Guardian (and can be found online) was enlightening not only on the family's reaction to Patchett's depictions of Lucy Grealy, but also on the Lucy Grealy herself, in that in an odd way it seemed to offer a missing piece of anything that might have been lacking in Grealy's own account. It greatly altered my previous opinion of Patchett and it also reminded me, both in regards to Patchett's memoir and Grealy's, that any narrative or autobiography writes of other people and that though what may be written is a truthful depiction of what the author felt and experienced, every person detailed has their own story, that somewhere where all of these accounts intersect is some semblance of accuracy and all we can do is understand the deficiency of our own portrayals and appreciate that which can be told.
OTHER REVIEWS:
(This is just a wrap-up of what other people seem to commonly find praise or fault with in this book.)
Positive reviews mentioned the following ...
- Beautifully written and inspiring
- Difficult to read in its honesty and "heartbreaking words"
- "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" (J. Babcock)
- Evokes emotion and empathy, very thought-provoking
- A candid story of the tragedy of cancer and how one woman was able to deal with it all at such a young age, but overcome it in the end
- Accurate criticism of our society's obsession with beauty and looks and that these qualify and determine our worth and lovability
Negative reviews mentioned the following ...
- The book was a long diatribe of self-pity
- She continually and singularly dwells on her own physical ugliness (disregarding the pain of others, that she should be thankful to be alive, etc.)
- Not enough details on other aspects of Lucy Grealy's life were included, no outside story or information on her family, too "one-dimensional" etc.
Humor in dark places November 12, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Lucy Grealy said it best herself when fans asked her how she remembered everything in such detail. She said, "I didn't remember it. I wrote it." And the result is beautiful, haunting and oddly funny. Grealy delves into the dark with such wit that even descriptions of chemo-induced vomiting and the cruelties of adolescent boys become bearable. The great tragedy is that we lost her so soon...
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