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Autobiography of a Face: Summary and book reviews of Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy, plus links to an excerpt from Autobiography of a Face and a biography of Lucy Grealy.
Autobiography of a Face
by
Lucy Grealy
Hardcover: Sep 1994,
223 pages.
Paperback: Mar 2003,
256 pages.
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.
Book Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
A gracefully written account of one woman's physical and spiritual struggle to surmount childhood cancer, permanent disfigurement, and, ultimately, 'the deep bottomless grief...called ugliness.' An unsentimental, honest, unflinching look at a single visage reflected (or distorted) in an unforgiving cultural mirror. A strong debut.
Publishers Weekly
Her discovery that true beauty lies within makes this a wise and healing book.
Library Journal - Wilder Williams
Grealy writes with a poet's lyric grace, but her account of her endless quest for beauty at times becomes repetitious; the most moving part of her memoir comes in her depiction of chemotherapy's agonies and the unintentional cruelty of parents telling their suffering child not to cry. For all collections.
Booklist - Donna Seaman
It's no surprise Grealy is a tremendously powerful writer: she saved her own life by telling herself stories to live by. Now she'll change our lives by sharing them.
New York Times Book Review
Despite its unblinking stare at an excruciatingly painful subject, this is not a dour book. Autobiography of a Face is a book about image, about the tyranny of the image of a beautiful - or even pleasingly average - face. In the end, this tyranny is not so much overthrown as shrugged off.
Washington Post Book World
Grealy has turned her misfortune into a book that is engaging and engrossing, a story of grace as well as cruelty.
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Autobiography of a Face
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