Released March 2003 (HarperCollins) * 256 pages * ISBN 10: 0060569662
Lucy Grealy writes about her childhood battle with Ewing’s sarcoma, which resulted in half of her jawbone being removed, and her teens and adulthood spent reconstructing her face and constructing her self. I read this a couple years ago, and then read Truth and Beauty (Ann Patchett) which has become the companion book to Autobiography of a Face. Now when I reread Grealy’s memoir, I can’t unknow what Patchett reveals about Grealy in her memoir so it’s hard to see it as a single work. (I’ll be rereading Truth and Beauty in the next few weeks and post a review when I do).
One of the passages from Grealy’s book that caught my eye:
pg. 7
This singularity of meaning—I was my face, I was ugliness—though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape. It became the launching pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked what was wrong with my life. Everything led to it, everything receded from it—my face as personal vanishing point.
I like the writing (see quote), but I just don’t find much that is universal in Grealy’s story and I find myself tiring of her life long before she did. Grealy disconnects herself so much from her emotions as a child that this distance is transmitted to the reader and I end up not caring as much as I should after spending 200 pages reader her life.
Something I did pick up on in the second reading that I didn’t see in the first, is Grealy’s dysfunctional view of how children should act:
pg. 29
…I found myself deeply embarrassed for the boy. How could anyone sink so low as to hide beneath a bed? This went against every belief I held dear. One had to be good. One must never complain or struggle. One must never, under any circumstances, show fear and, prime directive above all, one must never, ever cry. I was nothing if not harsh. Had I not found myself in this role of sick child, I would have made an equally good fascist or religious martyr
The way that Grealy deals with her childhood seems harsh, but it is the classic thinking of a child raised in a dysfunctional environment (her mother experienced depression requiring hospitalisation although this is mentioned only in passing).
Grealy focuses so much on herself that you are left with very little sense of the people around her—her parents, her siblings, her teachers, her doctors. The depth with which Grealy excises other people from her memoir becomes apparent in Ann Patchett’s Truth & Beauty which relates a different view of Grealy’s college years.
It’s not one of my favourite books, but the combination of Autobiography of a Face and Truth and Beauty gives insight into how truth is a matter of perspective and how you can tell the truth and yet lie by omission. If you read one of these books, you really should read the other as they are a set despite the fact that they are by two different authors (who were friends and even roommates for a while).
