So much pain.

This is a childhood cancer memoir, though the wonderful afterword by Ann Patchett does not want you to think of it as a cancer memoir, but as a beautiful piece of writing. OK, but it's about a girl who went to chemo every single week for two years.

And SPOILER alert. I found myself thinking, "I can't believe they killed her father and both her horses!!!" I don't know why my mind phrased it that way, "they", as if it were a movie, rather than a true story. But yeah. It's not bad enough she has bone cancer and disfigurement.

I was planning to go on to Ann Patchett's TRUTH AND BEAUTY next, which is about the adult friendship between Patchett and Grealy, but I just felt like I'd had enough. So much pain.

"The pain these children brought with their stares engulfed every other pain in my life." p XV

This is a heartbreaking read. Although I've never been physically disfigured in the way Grealy was, I resonated strongly with her thoughts on beauty and acceptance, and her fear of never being loved.

Because the main themes of the book were so serious in nature, I wasn't expecting for this to be nearly so funny as it was. That really helped to balance the book, kept it from being overwhelming.

As for morally objectionable content, there were a few sexual comments, nothing overly descriptive. God's name was used in vain.

The ending seemed abrupt somehow. I really wish there had been some sort of epilogue or afterword, especially since the edition I read was published after Grealy's death at age 39. (According to Wikipedia, she died of a heroin overdose after becoming addicted to her pain medication.)

This is one of those books that stays with you and makes you think. ( )

Linked to Truth and Beauty by Anne Patchett mentioned in “A Month of Sundays”

This was a difficult book to read, but one which I found beautifully written despite the emotional and physical pain suffered by the author throughout her entire story. As a child of nine, she was diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma, which is a cancer that was treated with radical facial surgery. In order to prevent a recurrence of the life-threatening cancer, she had to undergo two and a half years of chemotherapy. Following that, she endured years and years of mostly disappointing plastic surgery on her jawline. She never felt that her face was sufficiently acceptable in the view of others although she was able to make friends after high school, attend college and direct her career toward writing.

This book made me want to be her friend. She always seemed so lonely and misunderstood because of her appearance. Her greatest solace during her younger years was with her companionship and work with horses. Both of the horses that she once owned met untimely ends. It all seemed so unfair.

In this book, the author mentioned a lot about flap procedures for plastic surgery. As a surgical oncology nurse back in the 1960s and 1970s, I remember patients with those flap procedures. They were horrible. Fortunately the author never had any of those that were proposed to her, but the surgical procedures which she did have (there were so many!) had terrribly disappointing results. It all seems unfair to me that a child had to suffer such a fate and continue to endure hardships as what this author faced year after year. She was a very brave person for telling her own story with such eloquence. ( )

Good moving story of a disfigured girl and how she coped with it. ( )