Please read this completely disarming book about a child with cancer, who grows up to become a marvelous poet and author, so gifted and raw. Sure, her story ends sadly later, but that doesn't make this book any less true. Maybe the best autobiography I've ever read. ( )

Yeah, this was That Good. ( )

Yeah, this was That Good. ( )

Yeah, this was That Good. ( )

Yeah, this was That Good. ( )

I am having trouble writing my review for [Autobiography of a Face], by [[Lucy Grealy]], because I am so afraid I will not do it justice. This is a beautiful, brave and candid memoir of Lucy’s battle with cancer and subsequent multiple surgeries. It is not maudlin, but witty and insightful. I was afraid to read it, because I, too, grew up with lots of medical issues and I didn’t want to plumb those angry, fearful memories again. Did it touch upon those raw nerves? Yes, but just a touch. I found myself focused more intently on the beauty of her writing, and that would have made Grealy so happy. In the afterward, Lucy’s friend [[Ann Patchett]] explains that during her book readings, Lucy “was not there as a role model for overcoming obstacles. She was a serious writer, and she wanted her book to be judged for its literary merit and not its heartbreaking content.” Done! I loved it. Her voice is honest and lyric and her book is so much more than a medical diary. She delves inside the pain of being different, the secret desire to be perfect, and the ways in which our parents and circumstances shape (sometimes unwittingly) who we become.

One more point before I go. [[Patchett]] also wrote a book, entitled [Truth and Beauty] in which she shares Lucy’s life from her point of view as a friend in college and graduate school. Several people have said that they found it strange that Patchett is not mentioned in Grealy’s book. Not so much. Autobiography of a Face is centered far more on Lucy’s childhood and her family and Patchett entered the picture much later. I will say that I far prefer the character of Grealy in her own book, rather than the needy, sex-driven girl portrayed in Patchett’s book. An interesting contrast none-the-less. ( )

Lucy Grealy's memoir chronicles her experience surviving a childhood cancer that forced the removal of a large part of her jaw leaving her face severely disfigured. She helps us understand the experience of being "grotesquely" different, as both a child and an adult. In adulthood, she attends the writing program at Sarah Lawrence where she meets Ann Patchett (and the two become dear friends, a friendship that becomes the centerpoint of Patchett's stunning memoir, Truth and Beauty.)

Lucy goes on to attend the Iowa Writer's Workshop and the publication of this book brings her national writing acclaim. But it never solves the problem of the intense aloneness she feels in the world, wondering if anyone will ever truly love her, a hunger she can't manage to feed.

Honest and horrifying in parts. A brilliant memoir. ( )

Pretty good account of the life of a disfigured girl (from disease). ( )

Like many others, I read this book in tandem (well, six months after) with Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett. It was so interesting to read the story of a life from the perspective of both the person living it, and her best friend. Although the facts were the same, the tales were very different.

Lucy Grealy describes her battle with cancer and the repeated struggles to reconstruct her jaw. What was particularly difficult to read about was her solitude, self-induced and because of teasing and tormenting from her various peer groups. It came as something of a relief when she reached university and people became more accepting of her looks, in addition to the eccentric personality she began to cultivate.

Although this was a book full of emotions, I found it curiously lacking when compared to Patchett's book. Truth & Beauty painted Grealy as rather needy, and described this incredible friendship between the two authors, where Grealy never even mentioned Patchett in her autobiography. I have not read anything else of Grealy's, so I'm not sure if this is merely because of different writing styles, if she genuinely saw the friendship in different terms, or if this book was meant to focus so completely on her face that other details were purposely overlooked.

This was a fascinating book that describes the difficulties of cancer, combined with the problems coming of age with a very noticeable disfigurement, and details what steps Grealy took to overcome everything. However, it was strange to read after reading Truth & Beauty, in that I knew how her story would end when Grealy herself didn't. Grealy ended the book on a hopeful note, which was swiftly checked by the reality of Patchett's afterward. ( )

Read this after reading [book: Truth and Beauty] by Ann Patchett. These two books should be read as a pair. ( )

A beautifully written memoir filled with good writing and pyschological hauntings. ( )

I think the thing that struck me the most about this memoir was actually in the afterward written by her friend Ann Patchett. Ann Patchett had mentioned that Lucy had chosen to spare us from a lot of the details. I can't imagine anything more powerful, more painful, after reading this beautiful memoir that she gave us. RIP Lucy. You have made your big contribution to the world. It was this memoir and I know that with each new person that reads it, they will gain a whole new insight on not just their own life- but on others. ( )

This was a good book, moving and engaging. Though you would think that it was the battle with cancer itself which would prove troublesome, perhaps because of the young age at which she underwent this struggle, we see that it the resulting effects are what truly impacted Grealy's life.

Her book is insightful even for those who have not had to undergo the extraordinary struggles that she faced. The desire to be loved and feel special, to want to stand out in a singular and unique way and yet not be ridiculed, but rather adored, the simple joy that comes from being able to look at someone and know that they are looking back and see you and know you and understand you, loving you all the while, these emotions run throughout this book and would echo with anyone who has not always felt loved or accepted, who has doubted their worthiness.

CRITICISMS:
I did find that Grealy's siblings were quite absent throughout her narrative. She had four siblings, one of them a fraternal twin, and I found it quite odd that we don't really see that much of them or are given very clear depictions of them - especially her twin sister, Sarah, since all of the twins I've known have always been extremely close with their sibling.

I also found her father's death kind of glossed over and was unable to understand the detachment with which it was written about. That she only visited her father once in the hospital while he was there for a few months seemed incomprehensible to me, but who am I to judge another's grief or how they display it? Grealy later writes of finally feeling the loss of her father, and the regret with which she writes of that moment when she lay in her hospital bed, pretending sleep, and he walked softly in, was very moving and could be acutely felt.

As some other reviewers have mentioned, however, the book is entitled Autobiography of a Face and that is what you are getting.

OF NOTE:
As I was writing this review, I was doing some research online and found out that Lucy Grealy passed away in 2002. Apparently, the brief drug dependency mentioned in passing in AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE reemerged later in life and led to a presumed accidental drug overdose. She was close friends with Ann Patchett, author of BEL CANTO, and there has been some controversy surrounding Patchett's 2004 memoir, TRUTH & BEAUTY: A FRIENDSHIP, which recounts the friendship of the two authors (apparently Grealy's family objects to Patchett's portrayal of her).

The article "Hijacked by grief," by Grealy's sister Suellen, which appeared in the August 7, 2004 edition of the Guardian (and can be found online) was enlightening not only on the family's reaction to Patchett's depictions of Lucy Grealy, but also on the Lucy Grealy herself, in that in an odd way it seemed to offer a missing piece of anything that might have been lacking in Grealy's own account. It greatly altered my previous opinion of Patchett and it also reminded me, both in regards to Patchett's memoir and Grealy's, that any narrative or autobiography writes of other people and that though what may be written is a truthful depiction of what the author felt and experienced, every person detailed has their own story, that somewhere where all of these accounts intersect is some semblance of accuracy and all we can do is understand the deficiency of our own portrayals and appreciate that which can be told.

OTHER REVIEWS:
(This is just a wrap-up of what other people seem to commonly find praise or fault with in this book.)

Positive reviews mentioned the following ...
- Beautifully written and inspiring
- Difficult to read in its honesty and "heartbreaking words"
- "As Grealy shows us in her memoir, she was never different from anyone else: she was always just as imperfect, and beautiful, as we are" (J. Babcock)
- Evokes emotion and empathy, very thought-provoking
- A candid story of the tragedy of cancer and how one woman was able to deal with it all at such a young age, but overcome it in the end
- Accurate criticism of our society's obsession with beauty and looks and that these qualify and determine our worth and lovability

Negative reviews mentioned the following ...
- The book was a long diatribe of self-pity
- She continually and singularly dwells on her own physical ugliness (disregarding the pain of others, that she should be thankful to be alive, etc.)
- Not enough details on other aspects of Lucy Grealy's life were included, no outside story or information on her family, too "one-dimensional" etc.

(Written January 9, 2008 on Amazon.com) ( )

I just finished reading Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy. I originally got this book because I started out the year reading Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty: A Friendship, which is about Ann's friendship with Lucy. Lucy is a quite a colorful and tragic character in the book and I wanted to know more about her. I was also very curious to see what Lucy looked like because the subject of this book is her face, which was disfigured as a result of childhood cancer.

Her experiences with a disfigured face and the agonies and hardships caused by her cancer are the primary topics of this book. Her cancer treatment, which begins at age 9, is harrowing and heart-breaking. As a result of the treatments, a third of her jaw is removed--giving her a face that results in teasing, alienation and feelings of being unlovable. Two things struck me most about the book. One was how much she must have left out. She literally spent years having new procedures done to reconstruct her jaw and spent endless amounts of time in hospitals. Although you get a glimpse of what some of those operations and hospital stays were like, I can't even imagine what it must have been like to have been that sick for so long.

The second thing is how little information she seemed to have received about her various treatment and the lack of communication amongst her family. She writes several times about her mother's wish for her not to cry during chemotherapy and subsequent treatments: "If you pretend to be brave then you will be brave." What a burden to put on a child! She also writes about her father going into the hospital for stomach pains, but then he doesn't come home for months and virtually no one in the family goes to visit him except Lucy's mother. He ends up dying there--never returning home. Lucy goes to visit one time and then is ambushed by grief years later. One of the recurring themes of the book is how little her family talked about what was happening in their lives and how they felt--leading to so much unnecessary pain and misunderstandings. This is something I think so many of us can relate to--the things we leave unsaid to those we love the most.

Lucy's central struggle is to come to terms with her face and her concept of beauty and the question of whether someone with this kind of face can be loved. I think it is a struggle that we can all share--especially women. Physical beauty is so often correlated to being desirable and "lovable." But how many of us feel truly beautiful? How often have you felt undesirable because of how you looked? I know this is something I always struggle with (although it has gotten better in recent years). I think that once someone truly knows you as a person, they see the beauty within you and you do become beautiful and feel beautiful with them. But what about people you don't know? When all they are judging you on is how you look on the outside? I often feel so confident and good about myself and then will catch a glimpse of myself in a store window and go "Oh yuck. You look so ugly and dumpy and overweight." And all my good feelings about myself go down the drain.

Another thing that struck me as being universal about the book was Lucy's constant belief that with the next operation, her face would be "normal" again and then everything will be better. How often do we do this in life? "Once I make more money, things will be better." "Once I find someone to love me, things will be better." "Once I lose the weight, things will be better." We spend so much time thinking about how much better things will be if only this were true or that were true. And how often do we achieve something and find that things are still not better? At the end of the book--after a particularly long and extensive series of surgeries--Lucy realizes that her face is a normal as it is ever going to get. There will be no more surgeries, no more fixes. The man she is sitting with is only giving her positive reactions. She writes: "And then I experienced a moment of the freedom I'd been practicing for behind my Halloween mask all those years ago. As a child, I had expected my liberation to come from getting a new face to put on, but now I saw it came from shedding something, shedding my image. I used to think truth was eternal, that once I knew, once I saw, it would be with me forever, a constant by which everything else could be measured. I know now that this isn't so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things."

This is a not a fun, happy and breezy book, but it is thought-provoking and interesting. I would definitely recommend reading this book together with Ann Patchett's book as they complement each other very well. I wish I had read them closer together. ( )

Autobiography of a Face is Lucy Grealy's honest and unflinching look at her own life. It all starts when her jaw collides with a fourth grade classmate. Then she is diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma, a cancer with only a 5% survival rate, in her jaw. Over time, she goes through not only grueling chemotherapy, but also the removal of part of her jaw (causing the disfiguration of her face) and the countless reconstructive surgeries that follow.

Lucy's story is both inspirational and real. I admire how she admits inconsistencies in her memory, her innermost thoughts, and her insecurities. I liked that she didn't sugarcoat things. She talked about the things she thought as a child, whether they made sense or not, like did her wanting to feel special make her sick or was she too ugly to be loved? She illustrates how painful and time consuming the treatment for cancer is. The side effects for chemotherapy that she had were vomiting, weight loss, radiation burns, loss of appetite, pain, hair loss, and damaged teeth. This doesn't even include the initial removal of part of her jaw (and her disfigured face). To go through this as an adult is unimaginable to me, let alone as a child.

Throughout her life, Lucy experiences many of the same things that most people do, like her awkward relationship with her parents, the painful teasing and tormenting from schoolyard bullies, envy of normal children, fear of death, and her insecurities about her looks. The media's perception of the nature of beauty is so different from real people, that I can understand why the body image issues that typically plague young girls would be so much worse for Lucy. Growing up is hard enough to do without the extra complications she had to go through.

Just a side note: I first heard of this book because Chuck Palahniuk named it as an inspiration behind Invisible Monsters. These two books are very different from each other, but are excellent in their own right. ( )

Beautifully written, but sad & depressing. ( )

The book is written by Lucy Grealy, a woman who was diagnosed by Ewing's Sarcoma. She had an unfortunate childhood: boys calling her ugly, people staring at her, and hating her own face.

This book is easy to read, so straightforward. It's kind of disturbing sometimes how descriptive she is about her experiences. I would suggest that people who plans on reading this shouldn't read it while eating. I've done that (eating while reading) a couple of times, and it made me want to spit out the food I just bit. But other than that, it's really a good book.

She gives a vivid description of everything and it seems like you're also experiencing her experiences as you're reading this book. In my opinion, she didn't write this book so that people would pity her for having such an unfortunate life. I think, she wrote this so that we would be grateful of what we have and not complain for what we don't have. This book is really an eye-opener.

Wonderful writing, but artful I think in what she leaves out. Having previously read Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett, I think the reality lies somewhere between the two. Horrible journey for anyone, though she's resourceful enough to find silver linings throughout. The sparse detail lends an emeciated feel to the lack of family support and enouragement. Would recommend to anyone wanting a different kind of autobiography, especially women's perspective. ( )

Grealy was diagnosed with Ewing's Sarcoma at the age of nine. From then on, her life was divided into two parts before and after cancer. After the surgery to remove half her jaw, Grealy spent over two years enduring weekly chemotherapy treatments. When she was finally declared 'healthy', Grealy returned to the sixth grade -- only to be met with scorn and cruelty from her classmates.

Her story is written clearly and concisely. She is unerringly honest about how her disease affected her family, her developing personality, and those around her. As we follow her through years of skin and bone grafts, we witness her need or acceptance from others and her gradual acceptance of herself.

I was particularly struck by Grealy's need to be 'strong.' She is constantly reminded not to cry and to never show fear. This begins Grealy's quest to be the model patient. I am amazed that this small child was able to internalize and minimize her emotions, suffering, and considerable pain. To me, she seemed like an adult soul in a child's body.

I recommend Autobiography of a Face -- it is a moving and meaningful read. ( )

It feels odd to say that I enjoyed reading this memoir, mostly because of Grealy’s topic, Ewing’s Sarcoma. How does one enjoy reading a book about a 9 year old’s struggle with cancer and the subsequent emotional and physical damages she would suffer afterwards? I did however, enjoy Lucy’s fluid and descriptive writing. At times, her writing did seen overdone, but I didn’t think that she over dramatized any particular aspect of her life.

More at:

http://thenovelworld.com/2008/07/23/a... ( )

I really enjoyed this book. It was extremely well written and I found it quite beautiful, even though the content was heartbreaking. I know it's easy for me to say, but why not just stop having all the operations and just move on? I know she was young and I don't know what happened after she wrote this book. (I intend to read Truth and Beauty next.. and that might give more insight). It seems that she was finally able to accept herself for everything she was, which made me feel good. I can't even imagine going through everything she did at such a young age. But above all, this book kept me interested and was very well written. ( )

I was somewhat disappointed by this book after reading Ann Patchett's "Truth and Beauty" which was really amazing. My edition included Ann's comments at the end, in which she emphasized that Lucy wanted her book to be evaluated more for its writing skill than the story. I was moved by the story, and garnered a greater understanding of Lucy Grealy by the end of the book (she seemed an odd, unfocused, unmotivated, quirky, self-centered type of friend in Ann's book, one that I could not imagine being friends with). In this volume, I understood why she became the person that she did.

In terms of its writing quality, I felt there were too many realizations that were incongruent with a child's understanding -- too many ah-ha moments that a child would never have, no matter the circumstances. Perhaps I'm being too hard, that it is difficult to write a memoir without infusing one's adults thoughts into the details. She does a great job with showing our cultural emphasis on beauty, and how despite the fact that she survived this cancer (and others were less fortunate and less obviously whole), she would never find her own beauty, nor believe that others could see it in her.

I would recommend this book to people who read Ann Patchett's book, as well as to those who need or want to better understand childhood cancer more. ( )

Reviewed October 1998

Lucy contracted cancer of the jaw at 9 years old, to remove the cancer doctors took one-half of her jaw. She experienced treatments for 2 1/2 years, the pain she felt is very vividly expressed. Lucy shares with us her loneliness and pain at times so real I found myself crying for her. This autobiography is about beauty, those who have it don't really know it. She searches for it and finally finds it in her love of horses and poetry. Hospitals give her comfort only there she is treated special and not teased or taunted. All in all a truly honest book, and a quick read.

37-1998 ( )

This book was a wonderfully well-written account of Grealy's experience of childhood cancer. The book was brutally honest -- the account of the reactions and feelings of the author's parents and the author herself rarely painted a flattering picture, but did provide much insight into the author's experience. I'm looking forward to following this up with Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett. ( )

A beautifully written memoir filled with good writing and pyschological hauntings. ( )