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. In this strikingly candid memoir, Grealy tells her story of great suffering and remarkable strength without sentimentality and with considerable wit. When she returned to school with a third of her jaw removed, she faced the cruel taunts of classmates. At nine years of age, Lucy loses half her jaw to Ewings sarcoma.
It describes the psychological, social, and cultural implications of an ailment.
It is a story of courage and resilience in the face of adversity. The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison.”Īt age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer. Grealys memoir is a sensitive account of the relationship between physical appearance and self-esteem. It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly, that I always viewed as the great tragedy of my life. While her mother praises her “for being so good,” Lucy’s repeated efforts to deny her need to engage with her emotions, and release her pain and fear through crying, leave her feeling “absolutely nothing” and “only a void” (137).„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.
Time after time, she fails to stop herself from crying before, near the end of her two and half years of treatment, she finally stops weeping during chemotherapy. One must never, under any circumstances, show fear and, prime directive above all, one must never, ever cry” (29-30). At the age of 9, Lucy collides with a classmate during a game of dodgeball. She develops this into the most important component of her adopted code of conduct, that “ne had to be good. Published in 1994, Autobiography of a Face is award-winning poet Lucy Grealy’s prose debut, a widely-celebrated memoir concerning the author’s struggles with cancer and disfigurement. Symbolically, this is highlighted by her attempts to not cry, with her again focusing on the time when she was “courageous and didn’t cry and thus was good” (21). Lucy accepts this and makes every effort to suppress her emotions when she is around her mother, remembering her “first visit to the emergency room” where she had “been praised as good for being brave” which she took as “a formula for gaining acceptance” (30). Unable to truly help her daughter, Lucy’s mother attempts to do so by telling her to be brave and encouraging her not to show pain or fear about her illness and medical treatment. Lucy Grealys Autobiography of a Face deals with the life of Lucy Grealy, who faced the negative consequences of terminal cancer after the partial removal.
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