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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Sep 1994, 223 pages
Paperback:
Mar 2003, 256 pages
'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.'
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.
Chapter One
Luck
KER-POW!
I was knocked into the present, the unmistakable now, by Joni Friedman's head as
it collided with the right side of my jaw. Up until that moment my body had been
running around within the confines of a circle of fourth-grade children gathered
for a game of dodge ball, but my mind had been elsewhere. For the most part I
was an abysmal athlete, and I was deeply embarrassed whenever I failed to jump
bravely and deftly into a whirring jumprope, ever threatening to sting if I
miscrossed its invisible boundaries, like some science-fiction force field. Or
worse, when I was the weak link yet again in the school relay race. How could
one doubt that the order in which one was picked for the softball team was
anything but concurrent with the order in which Life would be handing out
favors?
Not that I considered myself a weak or easily frightened person; in more
casual games I excelled, especially at wrestling (I could beat every boy but one
...
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