| Autobiography of a Face |  | Author: Lucy Grealy
Publisher: Topeka Bindery
Category: Book
List Price: $22.75
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Avg. Customer Rating:  91 reviews
Sales Rank: 3302473
Media: School & Library Binding
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 0613648390
Dewey Decimal Number: 362.1969947160092
EAN: 9780613648394
ASIN: 0613648390
Publication Date: July 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
Book Description
The bestselling memoir by a woman who survived terminal illness only to confront the tragedy of being deemed unacceptable in a world that worships physical beauty.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 86 more reviews...
 Autobiography of a Face June 11, 2008
An amazing story of this girl's experiences growing up disfigured. I too was an "outcast on the school playground" and was "last to be picked for Gym games." I could relate to her story. What strength she had to endure so many, many surgeries.
Autobiography of a Face May 18, 2008
As Ann Patchett says in the Afterword, this is a literary "autobiography," created, as much as remembered by the author. Lucy's life and suffering are a small part of the story. The author's courage, articulateness and beautiful prose make this a good read.
 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....
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