Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read.

Start by marking “Autobiography of a Face” as Want to Read:

Other editions

Enlarge cover

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Open Preview

Autobiography of a Face

by Lucy Grealy

3.95 of 5 stars 3.95 · rating details · 16,021 ratings · 1,132 reviews

From Publisher:
"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 diag ...more

Paperback , 256 pages

Published March 18th 2003 by Harper Perennial (first published January 1st 1994)

more details... edit details

Get a copy:

Or buy for

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Reader Q&A

To ask other readers questions about Autobiography of a Face , please sign up .

Lists with This Book

Best Memoir / Biography / Autobiography

82nd out of 3,074 books — 3,456 voters

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Memoirs by Women

46th out of 1,457 books — 1,919 voters

More lists with this book...

Community Reviews

(showing 1-30 of 3,000)

filter | sort : default (?) | rating details

Jun 05, 2014 Doneen rated it 4 of 5 stars

I'm so glad I read this book after reading Ann Patchett's "Truth and Beauty," which was her take on the friendship between the two women. I came away from reading the first book with a very skewed idea of what the relationship was like. I didn't like Lucy Grealy at all--she came across as a self-involved neurotic who totally wasted her life and died of an accidental heroin overdose. After reading Lucy's own account of her childhood cancer and all the hardships she endured because of her treatmen ...more

flag 22 likes · Like · see review

Sep 03, 2015 ☯Cathrine rated it 3 of 5 stars

3.5
There is much said about this memoir from many POVs and my thoughts about it are complicated. As one reviewer pointed out the title says Autobiography of a Face and that’s what it is. Hoping to find a more holistic view to other aspects of life in the aftermath of her childhood experience left me disappointed. She spends the majority of this book in those early years and quickly wraps it up after college. Like others I wondered how she could so clearly recall the details and memories from suc ...more

flag 18 likes · Like · see review

Jul 13, 2012 jo rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommends it for: cate, and anyone interested in childhood trauma

Shelves: trauma , the-body , memoir , psychic-pain

this book knocked me for six (this, i'm told, is a cricket-based metaphor. the only other cricket-related sentence i know is "the sound of willow on leather," which english expats like simon use with a quiver in their voices. this has absolutely nothing to do with this review). lucy grealy writes about her experience with a severely crippling childhood cancer which, besides putting her through years of chemo and radiation therapy with accompanying nausea, pain, terror, ill-being, baldness, and m this book knocked me for six (this, i'm told, is a cricket-based metaphor. the only other cricket-related sentence i know is "the sound of willow on leather," which english expats like simon use with a quiver in their voices. this has absolutely nothing to do with this review). lucy grealy writes about her experience with a severely crippling childhood cancer which, besides putting her through years of chemo and radiation therapy with accompanying nausea, pain, terror, ill-being, baldness, and missed classes, also ended up the chopping off of a good chunk of her face. she was 9. it is not clear to me how happy her childhood had been till then. maybe it's not clear to her, either. but it is abundantly clear that the narrator of this memoir had an excruciatingly painful life at least starting at the age of nine till when she died of a drug overdose at 39 (while i don't doubt that she had moments of relief and even happiness, very few of these moments make their appearance in this memoir, and when they do they are a set up for further, more devastating falls).

the genius of this book is not the cancer narrative per se, but the narrative of a childhood trauma so powerful that it empties a soul from inside out and cuts away those tenuous, undefinable, yet essential resources that allow one to navigate life and find solace and comfort in the company of others and especially oneself. grealy's deepest disability is emotional.

since lucy grealy has a fabulous way with words and with feelings and sees really deep inside her pain, she depicts her cancer in the context of a family life marred by great emotional abstinence and isolation. adults are not good to lucy. the doctor who gives her her weekly injections of chemotherapy is always on the phone (yes, he gives her chemo while talking on the phone to someone else) and relates to her as if she were an orange instead of a child. they don't even exchange a word. for three years.

mom and dad, though obviously devoted to their children (if i remember correctly there are six of them, and lucy is a twin), fail to connect with lucy's pain either because they cannot deal with their own pain or because they are too ashamed and embarrassed (i.e. cannot deal with their own pain). by willing lucy's pain away and castigating her (gently but firmly) for complaining when she suffers, lucy's mother puts little lucy in a space in which pain is shameful and a sign of weakness. the adult author knows all too well that denying pain its devastation proliferates it and makes it fester, yet she can only look at the damage that was done and report on it. there is no transcendence in grealy's life.

a lot is made of peers' teasing (i can't imagine such horrible and relentless teasing happening when/where i was a child; ostracizing, gawking, and isolating, sure, but teasing like that? i don't think so. did i grow up in fairyland?), while hardly any mention is made of siblings. where are lucy's siblings, where is her twin while she walks to school among jeerings and attacks?

controversy arose when ann patchett published a memoir of her friendship with grealy. apparently patchett wasn't very kind to grealy's family. suellen grealy, lucy's older sister, felt moved to put out an angry article in defense of her family, her mother in particular. my review of this book has nothing to do with the reality of grealy's family, her siblings, her parents. it has to do only with the story the narrator of Autobiography of a Face tells us. she chooses to leave out her siblings and to depict her parents as emotionally unavailable. this has nothing to do with the reality of these things. nothing. anyone who misses this distinction does the grealy family the injustice suellen laments in her article.

having said this, i also want to say that, within the story , the traumatic impact of lucy's cancer is exponentially magnified by the bad emotional handling she gets from parents and doctors. in this sense, this is a tremendous testimony to the power of context in the genesis of devastating trauma. ...more

flag 15 likes · Like · see review

Jul 09, 2009 Jessica rated it 1 of 5 stars

Ehm...at the risk of sounding completely cold, I did not like this book. I spent most of the book so consumed by frustration for Lucy's mother and Lucy's own perceptions that I couldn't allow myself to feel anything else for her.

Yes, she was a cancer survivor, and she was treated horribly by her peers growing up. But sometime after the large portion of her jaw was removed, she admits that she didn't even understand that she had had cancer until many years later! She thought that people stared a Ehm...at the risk of sounding completely cold, I did not like this book. I spent most of the book so consumed by frustration for Lucy's mother and Lucy's own perceptions that I couldn't allow myself to feel anything else for her.

Yes, she was a cancer survivor, and she was treated horribly by her peers growing up. But sometime after the large portion of her jaw was removed, she admits that she didn't even understand that she had had cancer until many years later! She thought that people stared at her because she had lost her hair due to chemotherapy, not because of the shape of her face. She spent so much time deluding herself into believing a warped reality that she lost out on a good portion of her life. She came off as horribly selfish when detailing her many hospital stays and her initial reaction upon finding out her father had been hospitalized (her chances of getting a pony diminished significantly at that time). She obsessed about being loved, but did not make a very strong case for her being an ideal recipient of love.

The mother was frustrating solely for her inability to "mother". Your daughter is sitting in front of you having poison pumped directly into her body, and you chastise her for crying? Then you remark on how disappointed you are at the fact that she's "letting the treatment bring you down"? Seriously, if there was ever a child who could have used a pat on the head and a comforting, "There, there", it was Lucy.

She tended to dwell on things, and that lead to unnecessarily long and detailed sections that could have been left out. If you ever wanted to know which flavor of pudding to consume for a more pleasingly aesthetic vomit, this book will tell you. It will also tell you how to induce pneumonia by inhaling your vomit. Yes...lots of vomit talk, which goes back to my original point - it really could have been left out.

The last thing I want to say is that I'm not so callous as to not feel sympathy for the things that Lucy had to deal with in her life. It couldn't have been easy. But, here's the thing. The back jacket should not have promised a novel that told her story "without sentimentality", because that's not the same book that I cracked open. If those passages on love, acceptance and her place in the world weren't an example of wallowing in the sentimental, I don't know what is. ...more

flag 10 likes · Like · see review

Feb 04, 2014 Jenni rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction

Autobiography of a Face chronicles Lucy Grealy's battle with the physical and psychological effects of Ewing's sarcoma, a cancer that robbed her of much of her jaw. Grealy touches upon some of the more negative aspects of her ordeal, such as her need for attention and her tendency to blame all of her problems on her face, yet it is clear some of the tale is left untold. The writing itself is wonderful: flowing, elegant sentences filled with succinct vocabulary.

Grealy and author Ann Patchett (Be ...more

flag 8 likes · Like · see review

Jul 23, 2011 Caitlin Constantine rated it 4 of 5 stars

Several months ago, the mug shot of a criminal suspect landed in my work inbox. When I opened the email, I was so shocked that I gasped out loud, then giggled nervously as I quickly closed it. The young man was horribly disfigured, to the point that his face looked like the creation of a special effects artist in a horror movie. I saw his face in my mind for days afterward, sometimes seeing it in odd shadows in half-light rooms, and each time I was revolted. My very visceral horror was compounde Several months ago, the mug shot of a criminal suspect landed in my work inbox. When I opened the email, I was so shocked that I gasped out loud, then giggled nervously as I quickly closed it. The young man was horribly disfigured, to the point that his face looked like the creation of a special effects artist in a horror movie. I saw his face in my mind for days afterward, sometimes seeing it in odd shadows in half-light rooms, and each time I was revolted. My very visceral horror was compounded by my shame at seeing myself laid bare as a superficial, shallow person, then furthermore at my deep sadness when I tried to imagine what that kid's life had been like, how alienated he must have felt from the rest of the world, how much cruelty he'd seen, or maybe how much pity. Imagine dealing with the transient sociopathy of early adolescence that way. I know I had my share of shit flung in my direction, and the only thing "wrong" with me was that I was exceptionally tall and had glasses.

Reading this book gave me a glimpse of what I had tried to imagine, about how it would feel to know that the one thing about yourself that you could not hide is something that inspires people to treat you as if everything about you was wrong and defective and unworthy of love. Good lord, it broke my heart to read this book. Yet it was so good and so essential and so beautiful. Grealy's background as a poet who studied at Iowa shone through every page. No superfluous words, no excessive sentences, every image and every observation flawlessly rendered. Several times I put down the book to luxuriate in a perfectly-turned phrase or to consider a particular idea. The book is slim, about 220 pages, but the content within is substantial.

I'd heard a bit about her relationship with Ann Patchett before reading this, and also about her fatal drug overdose, and I'd worried that this knowledge would color my experience of the book, you know, the way knowing about David Foster Wallace's suicide leaves many of his readers combing his essays and fictions for clues. That external knowledge surfaced from time to time, but for the most part, the book was so beautifully written that it was easy to immerse myself in Grealy's world as I read. ...more

flag 7 likes · Like · see review

Nov 11, 2012 Alexis rated it 3 of 5 stars

Lucy Grealy’s memoir AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE was met with wide critical and popular acclaim when published. The book is overrated in my opinion, and it provides a good test case for Vivian Gornick’s concepts of the “situation” and the “story.” “Every work of literature has both a situation and a story,” Gornick writes in her book THE SITUATION AND THE STORY. “The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the i Lucy Grealy’s memoir AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE was met with wide critical and popular acclaim when published. The book is overrated in my opinion, and it provides a good test case for Vivian Gornick’s concepts of the “situation” and the “story.” “Every work of literature has both a situation and a story,” Gornick writes in her book THE SITUATION AND THE STORY. “The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say” (13). Grealy’s situation is compelling: as a young girl, she is diagnosed with the rare and formidable Ewing's Sarcoma and has an operation to remove the malignant tumor from her face. Her prognosis is dismal, and she is left with a disfigurement that makes her “ugly.” This sense of her own ugliness looms over her, and thus the story is about her unsurprising search for beauty and truth. Or, so she says.

Grealy’s search for truth falls short for me, in part because I suspect that she was conflicted about her own truth at the time of the book's writing, but her search for beauty is a strong, well-developed theme. Her musings on beauty and ugliness, in fact, as well as her excellent descriptions of the alien hospital world, were what made me stick with this book when I wanted to put it down. What was missing for me on the whole was complex story development; her situation is dramatic, while the story lacks shape and texture—in many places. I suggest that this flatness has to do with the book’s early avoidance of the shadow side of her experience during the time of her diagnosis and early treatment. She doesn't engage with her own doubt. Here’s an example of this flatness from a passage set during her initial hospital stay:

"This sense of comfort continued in the following days and weeks. There were definite problems to face here, but to me they seemed entirely manageable: lie still when you’re told, be brave. It didn’t seem like so much to ask, really, considering what I got in return: attention, absence from school, occasional presents, and,though I wouldn’t have articulated it, freedom from the tensions at home...Some of the other visiting parents, the ones who came in every day, felt sorry for my lack of visitors and sneaked me contraband food items. I played up to this expertly whenever I sensed a particularly orphan-sensitive audience. My mother would have been appalled if she’d known" (38).

The problem I had with this scene and others like it is they struck me as disingenuous. She never develops these “tensions at home” any further, but since she continues to refer to fraught family relationships, we have to take her on her word. If part of her identity was that of emotional orphan or orphan of illness, she doesn’t illustrate the “becoming” of that identity. In fact, mom and dad seem pleasant, caring, and supportive, albeit fuzzy, as characters. If there are tensions at home, show the reader. I don’t doubt that parents could do their best, and a child could still feel differently, could feel lost and alien. But Grealy doesn’t take us through the formation of this important alienation that underpins the story.

The flatness in the beginning is, I think, a problem of persona. Her early persona is one of a young girl trying to keep her chin up, to appear strong, and to avoid whining. While a perfectly believable pose for a child to adopt, a pose to spare her parents and to spare her shame, what she doesn’t write about is the underside of these exhausting heroics and overtures. We don’t get inside of how it felt to be her, struggling for strength in a time of what must have been unimaginable fear. In fact, her protestations against whininess come off as, well, whiny. The reader can be told that this conflict is heartbreaking, but we don’t feel it. She doesn’t let us deep inside the conflict—at least not initially. So for the first 50 or so pages, we are met with a somewhat unreliable narrator, one whom we suspect is holding back. When she does begin to share her conflicted interiority, it feels too late in the story.

Another problem I had was Grealy's reliance on summary. There were plenty of interesting scenes, but we were held back from them frequently, or we were told what they meant or stood for. Grealy’s problems may well have to do with narrative distance and persona. The story is either too close or too far, and in both cases the effect is loss of clarity. One technical issue that contributed to this distance was her overuse of the conditional tense: “I would,” “We would", “they would.” This approach veers too easily toward summary, and the effect is one of drifting through generic time—what life was like generally. Grealy writes some scenes in simple past, too, but the conditional is overused in order to avoid climbing inside of discrete, crystalline moments. Perhaps it was too painful for the writer to do, but this approach distanced me from story.

On the whole, I am glad I read the book. It did get better as she went; the insights became more felt, the persona more honest as she grappled with the mess inside. Grealy was at her best when grasping the minutiae of daily hospital life; here she seemed expert not only of a hidden world, but expert of herself, clear about her own responses to her peculiar alien existence. In these sections of the book, I felt the truth of what Gornick said about how clarity of persona energizes the story. Ultimately, I hope my criticisms of Grealy will help me puzzle out my own problems as a writer--narrative distance, time and tense, and compensating for story with capital-V voice.
...more

flag 7 likes · Like · see review

Jul 24, 2007 Stephanie rated it 4 of 5 stars

TIP: To be read AFTER Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty. This autobiography is very engaging and well written. The author tells of her experience with cancer, but she states that while she spent only a certain amount of her youth being treated for cancer, she spent the rest of her life being treated for looking different than everyone else. This is an exploration into a very interesting and intense individual far more than it is a documentary about the affects of cancer. It is rich in language and ...more

flag 6 likes · Like · see review

Jason Can you go into the last few thoughts you outlined at the end of you review. It's quite the misfortune but i only have this one on hand
Apr 03, 2013 08:42PM

Deirdre Fogarty-harris I already started reading Autobiography of a Face. I only discovered Lucy Grealy recently after a friend wrote about Mirrors. I became fascinated with ...more
May 04, 2013 11:37PM

Jul 29, 2010 Will Byrnes rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography-autobiography-memoir

At an early age, Lucy Grealy was found to have a rare form of cancer. It would define the rest of her life. A third of her jawbone was removed to try to stem the spread of this cancer. She endured two and a half years of chemotherapy and many subsequent years of radiation treatments. In addition, she had literally dozens of surgeries attempting to restore her face. Each time her body would eventually absorb transplanted material and sag back in on itself. Consider the garden-variety cruelty of m At an early age, Lucy Grealy was found to have a rare form of cancer. It would define the rest of her life. A third of her jawbone was removed to try to stem the spread of this cancer. She endured two and a half years of chemotherapy and many subsequent years of radiation treatments. In addition, she had literally dozens of surgeries attempting to restore her face. Each time her body would eventually absorb transplanted material and sag back in on itself. Consider the garden-variety cruelty of middle-schoolers. Then add to it a severe facial disfigurement. The taunting and insults were constant. High school offered minimal relief. One benefit to Grealy of her many hospitalizations was that she got to skip so much school-time, so much taunting-time.

Autobiography of a Face is Grealy’s memoir of her experience, inner and outer. She offers a blow-by-blow recounting of her medical trials, accompanied by the emotional turmoil that inevitably resulted. How does one cope with a world that defines beauty as value when one is clearly damaged? Eventually, Grealy decided that she would become deep . If she could not succeed at being beautiful, facially, she would become as smart as she could. In an interview she said that beauty is a label. What people want is to be seen as graceful, to be accepted, to be loved, to be appreciated. Beauty is a label that people lay across things that we want. The same applies to wealth, which, per se, is meaningless, but stands in for other things, desirability, power, freedom.

This is a book about identity. Are you your face? Do you see yourself through the eyes of the world or through your own? Can you accept who you are, disfigurements and all? Grealy found success in the world as a writer, but carried the pain of her appearance and the world’s cruelty to her about it with her for the rest of her days. She expresses appreciation for the fact that while she has had barriers to contend with, in many ways she was blessed, with a roof over her head, plenty to eat, clothing to wear, and sees how many people, people with perfectly normal faces, lack those basics.

The book is memorable and moving, offering an inside look at the girl, then woman, behind the face, sometimes behind the mask. There is a bit of distance here between the author and her emotions, but with such an intense, long-lasting trauma, a bit of distance may have been the only way that Grealy could have written her tale. It may not rank with great memoirs, but is an interesting, thoughtful and engaging one.

PS - I learned, after reading Autobiography , that Grealy, who had become a successful poet and writer, had suffered an addiction to heroine following her last reconstructive surgery and died of an overdose at age 39.

Grealy became friends with Ann Patchett at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Patchett wrote about their friendship in Truth and Beauty: A Friendship .

- July 2010 ...more

flag 5 likes · Like · see review

Apr 14, 2011 Ciara rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: autobio-memoir , read-in-2011

possibly i made a big mistake by reading this & then immediately reading truth & beauty by ann pratchett (as well as some of suellen grealy's choice comments about how ann pratchett never should have written truth & beauty ). my immediate thoughts on this book were something along the lines of, "not bad. she really touches a nerve about the power & perception of beauty in women. she seems to have some demons, but has to be incredibly strong to go through everything she has gone th possibly i made a big mistake by reading this & then immediately reading truth & beauty by ann pratchett (as well as some of suellen grealy's choice comments about how ann pratchett never should have written truth & beauty ). my immediate thoughts on this book were something along the lines of, "not bad. she really touches a nerve about the power & perception of beauty in women. she seems to have some demons, but has to be incredibly strong to go through everything she has gone through." (the book is a memoir about grealy's relationship with her face stemming from a diagnosis of earwig's sarcoma when she was nine years old. to treat the tumor, doctors had to remove a significant portion of her jawbone, & she proceeded to undergo almost forty surgeries to reconstruct her face over the next 25 to 30 years, none of which was successful. she spent years in hospitals, eventually becoming addicted to painkillers & street narcotics--though this aspect of the story is only hinted at in . as she enters adolescence, she is teased mercilessly by the other kids at school--mostly boys--& learns to think of herself as ugly & unlovable. she spends most of her life waiting for the surgery that will restore her face so that she can suddenly begin her life, but that surgery never happens. grealy died of a drug overdose in her 30s, six years after this book was published.)

in the afterword, pratchett suggests that the reader peruse this book at least a couple of times to inure herself against the drama of grealy's story, & to fully digest her power as a writer. i did not do that. i infrequently reread books. too many books, too little time. grealy is certainly a capable writer. at no point was i jerked out of the narrative by a clunky phrase or strange word choice. she is also a poetic writer (she considered herself a poet first & a memoirist not at all). which is probably my problem. i'm not big on atmosphere. this book has a lot of atmosphere, for lack of a better word. much as grealy waited for her face in order to start her life, i waited for a coherent narrative before i invested in this book, but it never really gelled. this is purely a matter of personal taste. i prefer writing that is a little bit more concrete than grealy's writing. & because truth & beauty gave me some perspective on how much of grealy's story was edited & shaped & pruned to portray a self-reflection that grealy preferred...well, all writers who write about themselves do this (or should), but something about grealy's choices rubbed me the wrong way. there was a self-conscious kind of self-mythologizing that grated a little.

but this is definitely one of those books that i think people should read & then decide about for themselves. i certainly don't think anyone would regret reading this book. ...more

flag 5 likes · Like · see review

Sep 02, 2007 Sandra rated it 4 of 5 stars

I am interested in writing memoir or at least creative non-fiction so I was excited to read this book. Certainly autobiography is self-centered by nature and one should not be surprised to find the subject's conciousness to take center stage. Grealy somehow manages to almost completely immerse us in her thoughts and feelings for the eighteen years between her diagnosis with Ewing's sarcoma and the writing of the book. Her honesty is unflinching and totally politically incorrect at times. There a ...more

flag 5 likes · Like · see review

Jan 23, 2009 Jen rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoirs-read

Wow! A truly touching story filled with so many little life lessons. A story that makes me cringe a little with guilt when I realize how good I have it yet how often I sometimes take my life for granted, my health for granted, my friends and family for granted... Ms. Grealy opened my eyes up to another world where she had every right to let life beat her down yet she continued to find strength and confidence and continued to somehow pull herself back up, hold her head high and continue to face t ...more

flag 5 likes · Like · see review

Aug 09, 2015 Elyse rated it 5 of 5 stars

A friend sent me a recommendation at this book a few minutes ago.
I read it when it first came out.
I also highly recommend it

True story - sad- beautiful.
One of those stories one never forgets!

flag 5 likes · Like · see review

Oct 28, 2012 Patty rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012 , 2012-book-group , family , new-york-city , iowa , scotland , cancer , self-image , memoir , women-writers , coming-of-age , horses , autobiography , poetry , poets , survival , talk-tote , dysfunctional-family , writing

About 20 years ago, I read an essay by Grealy in a book about women and their bodies. (I can't figure out what that book was titled.) I was so impressed by her story that when Grealy's memoir was published, I read it immediately. I could not imagine being so honest about one's body and self image. I found Grealy's story fascinating and very forthright.
Then, I encountered Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett. This is the story of her friendship with Grealy. It wasn't until I picked up Patchett's memo ...more

flag 4 likes · Like · see review

Feb 12, 2010 Wendy rated it 2 of 5 stars

I'm not sure I found this quite as revelatory as I hoped I would. The "medical memoir" aspect of it was interesting and often appropriately horrifying. The more personal aspects - the parts about what it's like to walk around the world with a very conspicuous trace of illness and surgeries - were often compelling for me to consider more than for me to read Grealy discuss.

I'm not 100% sure that Grealy was a strong enough writer to tell her important and interesting story as well as it might have ...more

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

Oct 18, 2008 Kristine (fezabel) rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography-memoir

As seen in Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett, Lucy Grealy is a selfish spoiled girl. Her main concern in this book is not how to live with the disfigurement from cancer, but how to make people do things to make her happy. She learns to work the system to get what she wants. There's no great introspection in her story. She has no startling insights about life. She just goes along from surgery to surgery begging for attention and love while not giving anything back to others. The most interesting ...more

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

Jul 02, 2007 sydney rated it 5 of 5 stars

Grealy's memoir describes her battle with bone cancer in adolescence, the removal of half her jaw, her two-and-a-half years of radiation/chemo treatments, the string of surgeries to "fix" her face that lasted into her adulthood as each successive reconstruction was absorbed back into her body, and her attempts to be a model patient and keep her family happy by never showing emotion during the ordeal. It's a beautiful, well-written book exploring a young girl's struggle to reconcile her "ugly" ap ...more

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

May 05, 2007 Sarah rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book says a lot about how our society reacts to "ugliness." It is about a woman who had cancer as a young girl. She beat it, but was left without a jaw on one side of her face.

She says, "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 mi ...more

flag 3 likes · Like · see review

Mar 05, 2014 Crystal rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir

The candor with which Grealy writes is what makes this book so fascinating. As I've read before in some book of writing instruction, I would suspect that this candor can only come with the passing of time. I stumbled on this book several years ago and wanted to read it because I am interested in the memoir genre. Then I read some negative press about Grealy surrounding Ann Patchett’s book, Truth and Beauty. I, then, decided that I didn’t want to read the book. I’m sorry I waited so long. I feel The candor with which Grealy writes is what makes this book so fascinating. As I've read before in some book of writing instruction, I would suspect that this candor can only come with the passing of time. I stumbled on this book several years ago and wanted to read it because I am interested in the memoir genre. Then I read some negative press about Grealy surrounding Ann Patchett’s book, Truth and Beauty. I, then, decided that I didn’t want to read the book. I’m sorry I waited so long. I feel this book is an excellent example of presenting the truth and struggle, ugly or not without the whiny self-pity that other memoirs occasionally contain. Grealy neither makes herself a hero or a character to be pitied. I perceive that she writes honestly about her struggle with self-image as a teenager which is amplified 100 fold by the fact that she has undergone the trauma of losing part of her jaw to a rare childhood cancer. Yes, this is a story about body image, acceptance, and coming to terms with the defining factors of one’s own life. Throughout there are pithy thoughts that are worthy of quoting to help keep one’s perspective in check.
“While our bodies move ever forward on the time line, our minds continuously trace backward, seeking shape and meaning as deftly as any arrow seeking its mark.” (page 27)
“Sometimes the briefest moments capture us, force us to take them in, and demand that we live the rest of our lives in reference to them.” (page 78)
The conclusion to this book is one of the best that I have read in quite a while. The last 3 or 4 paragraphs are both poetic and very insightful. Time spent reading this book is time well spent. There is no choice but to smile softly when the reader reaches the end. I will now move on to Ann Patchett’s book, Truth and Beauty.
...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Aug 10, 2014 Bill Kupersmith rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: me-before-you , nonfiction

Lucy Grealy was a poet, essayist, and autobiographer. She was born in Dublin in 1963 and her family immigrated to Spring Valley, New York, when she was four years old. Her father worked in television. Lucy was a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and received an MFA degree from the University of Iowa Creative Writing Program (the “Writer’s Workshop”).
The crucial experience in Lucy’s life happened at age nine, when as a result of a playground accident to her jaw, she was diagnosed with Ewing’s
Lucy Grealy was a poet, essayist, and autobiographer. She was born in Dublin in 1963 and her family immigrated to Spring Valley, New York, when she was four years old. Her father worked in television. Lucy was a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and received an MFA degree from the University of Iowa Creative Writing Program (the “Writer’s Workshop”).
The crucial experience in Lucy’s life happened at age nine, when as a result of a playground accident to her jaw, she was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, an especially aggressive and usually lethal form of cancer. Lucy underwent repeated stays in hospital and outpatient treatments with radiation and chemotherapy. The chemo treatments were especially painful and left her feeling nauseated and physically wrecked. But the treatment was successful, at least with respect to the cancer. But it was to destroy most of Lucy’s right lower jaw, as well as costing Lucy most of her teeth, so that throughout her life she couldn’t close her mouth normally, eat solid food, or kiss. Her mutilated face made her the butt of cruel teasing by other children, and she saw herself as an ugly monstrosity that no one would ever love.
Autobiography of a Face is her memoir, recounting Lucy’s life from childhood into her twenties. It was published in 1994 to considerable critical acclaim and is still in print. When literary figures, such as Joan Didion, write books about grief and loss, these are usually reviewed by other writers. But as reading Autobiography of a Face, we felt challenged to try to understand Lucy’s experiences not from a literary point of view, but as trained chaplains and spiritual care givers.
Unless specifically assigned to a pediatric unit, a chaplain is unlikely to see a pediatric patient except with a referral from the child’s mother. And quite often, especially in the case of young children, most of our pastoral care is devoted to supporting the parent, not the child. For Lucy the situation was particularly tricky. As a nine year old she was mature enough to be very conscious of what was happening to her, but too young to be taken seriously by adults. And the support she received from her parents was anything but helpful.
Lucy received chemo on Fridays, which then involved two very painful injections administered by a physician while he was distracted by talking on the telephone. Outpatients are very poorly cared for by spiritual care departments, which are just not set up for them. Of course if one of us knows we are scheduled for a procedure and want some spiritual support, we’d arrange ahead of time to meet a chaplain at the clinic. But then we know our way around a hospital. It appears that during all the time she was treated at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, Lucy and her family never saw a chaplain, Presbyterian or otherwise. Why couldn’t a nurse or a receptionist have got in touch with pastoral care and said, “We’ve got nine year old girl who’s having some very painful chemo treatments, and she and her mother are usually kept waiting for a couple of hours every Friday afternoon. Could you drop by the waiting room and see if you can do anything for them?”
Lucy’s mother seems only to have exacerbated the pain of her daughter’s treatment. She insisted that however painful they were, Lucy must maintain a stoic attitude. She explained to Lucy “how disappointed she was that I’d cried even before Dr. Woolf had put the needle into me, that crying was only because of fear, that I shouldn’t be afraid” (78), Lucy adds, “my mother didn’t know how to conquer what I was afraid of, nor could she even begin to tell me how to do it for myself.” A caregiver would try to help Lucy respond quite differently, to be able to articulate her fears. Pain is an evil and pretending it is not there. Fear is not something that needs to be “conquered”; it simply needs to be acknowledged as a normal response to pain and loss.
As Lucy’s treatments continued she tried to find on her own, with only a child’s perspective to draw on, ways of coping with the intolerable. One was simple evasion, to make herself ill enough that the treatments would have to be suspended. She went out in a storm at night getting chilled and drenched and hoping it would raise her white blood cell count. She tried drinking dishwashing liquid to feel nauseated, inhaling water to cause pneumonia, and jabbing herself with rusty nails. Apparently Lucy’s sense of self-preservation kept her from doing anything so extreme as to cause permanent injury.
Lucy’s family were religious skeptics, but somehow Lucy somehow found herself on a prayer list and was deluged with sentimental tracts and letters. Lucy wanted to become a believer so that God could give her peace and healing, but how? “After all, I was sold, I wanted to have Jesus help me out and make me good and strong and pure . . . —but exactly how was I supposed to do this? . . . In secrecy I sat down in my bedroom on the blue carpet and asked, ‘God, if you exist, prove it to me.’” But of course there was no voice; the carpet didn’t change color; there was no sudden light. “I knew I only half expected an answer. Was my partial belief preventing God from speaking to me? Didn’t I have to fully believe, or did all this simply mean that there was no answer. . . . I couldn’t bear to think I was wrong, that somehow everything I was going through didn’t actually have meaning.” That everything I was going through didn’t actually have meaning—this is a very succinct summation of a common symptom of spiritual distress, as was Lucy’s sense that God was absent or indifferent.
Good pastoral care would have reassured Lucy that her pain and fear were real and that her mother’s insistence that she should hide them was the opposite of helpful. It would have helped bring Lucy to awareness that God does not perform magical healing that is conditional on ignoring her doubts, but that despite her doubts and fears, Lucy was not alone, that God was with her in all her suffering and would give her the strength to deal with the painful effects of her treatment.
During the period that Lucy was in junior high school the chemo and radiation treatments were successful in eradicating the cancer, but the after effects left her with a mutilated face that was to be her curse for the rest of her life. Other children regarded her as a sort of monster, and the only occasion where she associated normally with other children was Halloween, when she could hide behind a mask. Lucy perceived her mutilated face as transforming her into something that no one could ever love.
Trying to bargain with God was one of the devices Lucy adopted to make her suffering bearable. Another, which many of us have attempted to use, was to reflect on how many there are who are enduring worse. After she finished the course of treatment, she had to humiliation of being ridiculed for her facial appearance. How trivial that seemed compared to the atrocities being perpetrated in the world. “My inner life became ever more macabre. Vietnam was still within recent memory and pictures of the horrors of Cambodia loomed on every TV screen and in every newspaper. I told myself again and again how good I had it in comparison. What wonder it was to have food and clothes and no one torturing me. . . . I bombed and starved and persecuted my own suffering right out of existence” (126).
What gives a particular piquancy to Autobiography of a Face is the narration. While much of the story is seen from the perspective of a child, when Lucy wrote the memoir she was already in her thirties, an accomplished literary stylist, who offers an especially insightful comment on her youthful attempt to will away her own suffering by reflecting on the greater sufferings of others: “I had the capacity of imagination to momentarily escape my own pain, and I had the elegance of imagination to teach myself something true about the world around me, but I didn’t have the clarity of imagine to grant myself the complicated and necessary right to suffer” (126-27). The mature Lucy beautifully phrased those different powers of her imagination. Capacity of imagination is the ability to escape from the painful present, elegance of imagination is the ability to use what apply what we imagine to our circumstances—that is the quality we use when we imagine ourselves into a character in fiction. It is also what a chaplain draws on to empathize with a patient. But clarity of imagination allows us to compare and contrast, to perceive whether the situation we imagine fits the actual perceptions of the patient. One of the hardest lessons to learn as a chaplain is that the patient’s perception was the reality. In Lucy’s case she had to be her own chaplain and alleviating her suffering by reflecting on the greater sufferings of others simply does not work.
When she was in high school Lucy read Hesse’s Siddhartha, and like so many of us in the sixties and seventies, she went through a Buddhist period. Having encountered the noble truth that all suffering is the result of worldly attachment. “Desire and all its painful complications, I decided, was something I could and would be free of” (178). Of course instant enlightenment through popular fiction proved as illusory as Lucy’s previous attempts to alleviate her suffering. Surgery to repair her jaw proved ineffectual. The aftereffects of the radiation treatment prevented skin grafts from being successful; they were simply reabsorbed.
In college at Sarah Lawrence and graduate school in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, Lucy finally discovered friends who could love her as well as some literary success. There is a beautiful memoir, Truth and Beauty, by the novelist Anne Patchett, who was Lucy’s housemate in Iowa City, lovingly depicting her friendship with Lucy, a friendship that only ended with Lucy’s death at the age of thirty-nine. Sexually Lucy was very promiscuous, obsessed with having sex to prove to herself that she could attract men, as well as addicted to heroin.
Some readers of Ann Patchett’s memoir cannot understand how Anne could have put up with such a manipulative and clingy friend as Lucy. But those of us who have had a relationship, however difficult, with high maintenance high-octane persons like Lucy will understand. By comparison relationships with others just seem dull.
As an adult Lucy continued to undergo surgeries and attempted to find treatments, including moving to Scotland, where Lucy’s Irish citizenship made her eligible for the National Health Service. “How could I pass up the possibility that it might work, that at long last I might finally fix my face, fix my life, my soul?” (215).
According to Ann Patchett, Lucy underwent thirty-six surgeries. None of which was more than temporarily successful. Surely her surgeons must have been partly to blame for encouraging so many procedures when it must have been obvious that there was little chance that they would be effective. But it was Lucy herself who saw her face as her only “hope” for a life that she could accept.
We come away from reading Autobiography of a Facewith the sad insight that by the time she was a teenager Lucy had already focused all her hopes on the wrong object. In spiritual care we distinguish between cure and healing. Lucy was obsessed with a cure, with “fixing” her face so that she could become an object of love, and then her real life would finally begin. But for her to be healed would have meant that being able to accept that she already was loved and was worthy the love of her friends, and of herself. ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Jul 20, 2014 Sheri rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: male-female-power-sex-attractivenes , nonfiction

I read Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty a while back and was intrigued by Greely’s story. I was excited to read Greely’s version (especially since there was such controversy between her family and Patchett). As a former student of physical attractiveness (my MA dealt with the mechanics and development of measuring facial physical attractiveness), I was curious to read about Greely’s experience. Unfortunately, I was disappointed.

I think part of my disappointment in this book was due to my knowledg I read Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty a while back and was intrigued by Greely’s story. I was excited to read Greely’s version (especially since there was such controversy between her family and Patchett). As a former student of physical attractiveness (my MA dealt with the mechanics and development of measuring facial physical attractiveness), I was curious to read about Greely’s experience. Unfortunately, I was disappointed.

I think part of my disappointment in this book was due to my knowledge about Greely’s life from Patchett’s book. I was surprised that there was no mention of Patchett (at all). I was disappointed that Greely didn’t really discuss much of her adult life, but I was not completely surprised because Patchett describes Greely as having rushed to finish the book. It comes across this way; she spends 2/3s of the book from the age of 9-13 and then the last third rushes through college and grad school. I would have liked to know about Greely as an adult.

I was also skeptical about some of her details (and this probably comes form some pre-conceived notions about Greely’s tendency to re-write history that I got from Patchett). Why does she not know her siblings’ ages? Why is she so flip about her mom never visiting and hating to come into the city only to describe in the next chapter about how her mom ALWAYS drove her to chemo and how her mom’s hospital visits were comforting because she (her mom) would just sit and knit and not expect to make conversation. Why is there no mention of her breast augmentation surgery? She presents herself as struggling with (but sort of ultimately rising above) her appearance, but she doesn’t mention her adult body modifications.

I think I was most disappointed that she only mentioned her twin sister Sarah in passing. Frequently she wonders what she would have looked like if she hadn’t had cancer. I would assume that Sarah might provide a decent approximation (unless, of course that she and Sarah are fraternal, rather than identical, twins but she says so little about Sarah that the reader doesn’t even know this crucial detail). I was also curious about their friendship (or more likely lack of); aren’t twins supposed to be closer than normal siblings? Why is it that Lucy almost entirely omits Sarah from the book?

Greely does have a few good observations and her use of language is certainly poetic. Some of the quotes that I liked were:
“Anxiety and anticipation, I was to learn, are the essential ingredients in suffering from pain, as opposed to feeling pain pure and simple.”

“Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people”

“Everybody…was always looking at someone else’s life and envying it, wishing to occupy it. I wanted them to stop, to see how much they had already, how they had their health and their strength. I imagined how my life would be if I had half their fortune. Then I would catch myself, guilty of exactly the thing I was accusing others of.”

“I discovered what it was to love people. There was an art to it, I discovered, which was not really all that different from the love that is necessary in the making of art. It required the effort of always seeing them for themselves and not as I wished them to be, of always striving to see the truth of them.”

“most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things.”

And, my favorite quote reminded me of the pain of labor. As I told my husband, it wasn’t so much the pain as that I couldn’t catch a break between contractions. Each time I was supposed to “rest”, I was instead gripped with the knowledge that the pain was gonna return (and soon). Greely captures this well with her description of the cycles of chemotherapy: “This presented a curious reversal of fear for me, because I already understood that with other types of pain the fear of not knowing about it usually brought about more suffering than the thing itself. This was different. This was dread. It wasn’t some unknown black thing hovering and threatening in the shadows; it had already revealed itself to me and, knowing that I knew I couldn’t escape, took its time stalking me.”

Overall it is an interesting book, but I was disappointed in the scope. Rather than describer her life, Greely spends most of the time simply enumerating her surgeries and her life as a patient. I was hoping for a memoir and instead, this is a book about cancer and medical intervention. ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

view all 4 comments

Margitte Sheri wrote: "It was still an interesting read. Funny also to have read In the Fault of Our Stars recently as that is a much more entertaining and tou ...more
Jul 05, 2014 10:23AM

Sheri It was very good..enjoy!
Jul 05, 2014 10:25AM

Aug 10, 2014 Dianne rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

Exquisite memoir by poet and novelist Lucy Grealy. Diagnosed with Ewing’s Sarcoma at aged nine, Lucy had half of her jawbone removed and spent the next three years undergoing constant radiation and chemotheraphy treatments. The brutal toll that the damage and subsequent reconstructive surgeries took on her face and psyche is the focus of the book, which covers the time between her diagnosis and early adulthood.

Grealy is an intelligent and gifted writer and her thoughtful examination of her disfi ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Nov 29, 2010 Peter rated it 4 of 5 stars

It would be pretty hard to find real fault with a book this gorgeous and unflinching. In her afterward, Ann Patchett recommends reading it a second time "just for the sentences." And this is perhaps what ultimately lifts it above other memoirs on similar subjects. It's not just a horror story, or a story about determination and the human spirit. It is a book that turns the unthinkable into lucid startling prose.

Physical pain can be a hard subject to write about, but Grealy re-defines it again an It would be pretty hard to find real fault with a book this gorgeous and unflinching. In her afterward, Ann Patchett recommends reading it a second time "just for the sentences." And this is perhaps what ultimately lifts it above other memoirs on similar subjects. It's not just a horror story, or a story about determination and the human spirit. It is a book that turns the unthinkable into lucid startling prose.

Physical pain can be a hard subject to write about, but Grealy re-defines it again and again in ways I would never have imagined. At times, it simply is what it is. Unrelenting pain. Other times, the pain is a kind of comfort, something that distracts her from the larger implications of her illness. At other times, she becomes so used to feeling bad in a hospital, she finds herself crying when it's time to leave. It becomes part of her in countless ways. A badge. A basic hindrance. A reminder that she's alive.

Yet, on top of the raw sensory explorations of her condition, there are succinct meditations on physical beauty and how much we often rely on our image to determine our sense of self. At one point, near the end, Grealy tries to give up on mirrors, and she slowly is able to separate her image from her self. Yet, it still finds her in the reflection of a glass table.

At times, the experience here is so harrowing, it's hard to remember that this is an aesthetically beautiful book. Each time an operation is botched it becomes harder to read on. Yet reading on must match the feeling (on some tiny tiny level) of what it must have been like to "go on" under these circumstances. To constantly re-access what it means to think of yourself as scarred or ugly. To always be waiting for the next best hope. And ultimately, to find enough distance to turn it into meaningful art. ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Sep 19, 2007 Carla rated it 5 of 5 stars

an extremely sad but interesting memoir. having read truth and beauty by ann pratchett, a memoir about the friendship between these two authors, i was able to see the other side of the relationship. its nice when you can see the whole picture instead of just one person's experience. although lucy didn't get into the friendship as much since it was her memoir about her life up to a certain point, it did give me insight into her illness and its effect on her personality and emotional problems. if ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Jul 23, 2007 Kate Garroway rated it 4 of 5 stars

A beautifully written memoir about the late Grealy's struggle with childhood cancer leading to many, many reconstructive surgeries over 20 years. She tells her story with wit and perspective which seems improbable given what she went through. The treatments sound pretty primative now.

I recommend resisting the urge to follow this up with Ann Patchett's about Grealy after she died. Patchett reveals a lot about Grealy and I wished I could have un-read these details and returned to the stronger, sw ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Feb 27, 2014 Sue Bridehead (A Pseudonym) rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir

I have no criticisms to offer. Beautiful on a sentence level. Insightful. Very often funny. I like how Grealy takes an ordinary kid -- herself -- and shows the rationalizations and mental gymnastics she goes through to accept herself after being rendered physically non-beautiful by disease. Shelve this next to The Fault in Our Stars as a book about what it's really like to be a kid whose life is stamped by illness.

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Jun 02, 2015 N rated it 2 of 5 stars

Before reading this book, I read, reread, and assigned students to read Grealy's essay "Mirrorings," which contains much of this book's information compressed to 15-ish pages. Often students remark that required readings are dark and depressing, and I've consistently been surprised at their overall positive response to "Mirrorings." While they acknowledge its sadness, they also find inspiration in it, and I believe that is because of Grealy's on-point reflections, where she says things like, "Ta Before reading this book, I read, reread, and assigned students to read Grealy's essay "Mirrorings," which contains much of this book's information compressed to 15-ish pages. Often students remark that required readings are dark and depressing, and I've consistently been surprised at their overall positive response to "Mirrorings." While they acknowledge its sadness, they also find inspiration in it, and I believe that is because of Grealy's on-point reflections, where she says things like, "Take all the many nouns in our lives--car, house, job, family, love, friends--and substitute the personal pronoun 'I.' It is not that we are all so self-obsessed; it is that all things eventually relate back to ourselves, and it is our own sense of how we appear to the world by which we chart our lives . . . ."

It is this reflection, this processing of all that happened, this wise, essay-ing presence that's missing from Autobiography of a Face. Another reviewer, Alexis, cites Vivian Gornick's notion of situation (the event) and story (what one has to say about the event). Alexis observes that Grealy's book has a compelling situation, but not much of a story. This strikes me as very apt. The power of "Mirrorings" is its heartbreaking situation and eloquent wisdom about this situation. This elegant, necessary balance is not to be found in Autobiography of a Face, which is more about Grealy's adolescent POV than the inner story of her writerly mind.

My edition of the book includes an afterward by Ann Patchett, which I'm overall conflicted about, but there are some lovely lines about truth and memoir. Patchett recalls someone at a reading asking Grealy about how she remembered all the details from her childhood. According to Patchett, Grealy responded, "I didn't remember it. . . . I wrote it. I'm a writer." Patchett goes on to say, "This shocked the audience . . ., but she had made her point: she was making art, not documenting an event. That she chose to tell her own extraordinary story was of secondary importance. Her cancer and subsequent suffering had not made this book. She had made it. Her intellect and ability were in every sense larger than the disease."

This book is indeed a construct of a woman's formidable skills and astuteness. I just wish it had more clearly showcased them.

...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Aug 09, 2015 John Mccormack rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: autobiography , book-author-who-is-new-to-me , non-fiction , family

I first learned of this book by reading Anne Patchett.I like an autobiography that feels as if I'm accompanying the author.Despite everything Lucy went through the anding was hopeful and uplifting.Lucy was also a poet and this was evident in her writing.

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Apr 21, 2015 Sally rated it 4 of 5 stars

Lucy has interesting ways of coping with her disfunctional family and the disfigurement of her face. I read this book because I read Ann Patchett's book " Truth and Beauty" and I was curious to see the story from Lucy's side. At first I was disappointed that Lucy did not talk about Ann. In fact she mentioned very little about her years at Grad school and the friends she made. She did not talk about making her way after grad school. Ann Patchett wrote an afterword to it and that explained about h ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Jan 02, 2009 Katherine rated it 5 of 5 stars

Lucy Grealy never thought that she was handicapped as she went through the traumatic and countless surgeries that claimed nearly a third of her jaw due to Ewing sarcoma. It wasn’t until she had to return to school and saw the furtive stares and caught the quick glances from teachers, parents, and students that she realized she was different. As time went by, Lucy’s identity became directly tied into her appearance.
In her memoir, Autobiography of a Face, Grealy traces the history of her illness ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

« previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 … 99 100 next »

new topic
Discuss This Book

topics	posts	views	last activity
The Rory Gilmore ...: Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy	5	88	Nov 26, 2012 06:25AM
Aiossa's 12/13 Se...: Yvette #3 Memoir	1	2	Nov 08, 2012 09:59PM
Lucy Grealy has been dead for a decade. She was a great talent.	2	26	Jul 08, 2012 07:51PM

Readers Also Enjoyed

Genres

Autobiography > Memoir

404 users

Non Fiction

305 users

Biography

92 users

Biography > Autobiography

42 users

Biography Memoir

41 users

Book Club

16 users

Medical

15 users

Academic > School

14 users

Psychology

12 users

Adult

9 users

See top shelves...

About Lucy Grealy

Lucinda Margaret Grealy was a poet and memoirist who wrote Autobiography of a Face in 1994. This critically acclaimed book describes her childhood and early adolescence experience with cancer of the jaw, which left her with some facial disfigurement. In a 1994 interview with Charlie Rose conducted right before she rose to the height of her fame, Lucy states that she considers her book to be primar ...more

More about Lucy Grealy...

Books by Lucy Grealy

Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse (mobi) (Signet Classics)

Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales

More…

Share This Book

Share on your website

title link	preview: Autobiography of a Face
avg rating	preview: Autobiography of a Face Goodreads rating: 3.95 (16021 ratings)
small image	preview: click here [close]
med image	preview: click here [close]
BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/534255.Autobiography_of_a_Face?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1386921470l/534255.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/534255.Autobiography_of_a_Face?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy[/url]