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. “I used to think that 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.

But she is searingly honest as well about herself, about her hubris and her unsympathetic insularity. Grealy became wise in the ways of human weaknesses-cruelty, foibles, and pride.

Its power heaves up from the pavement right in front of your eyes, steam escapes in fits and starts as if the whole place were going to blow any minute, people who have already blown apart lie in its crevasses, and all the while there is a thin promise, a slight wheedling tone, that something important, something drastic, is about to break.” It makes no difference that for the most part New York is a giant grid, supremely traversable compared with such labyrinths as Paris or London. A knowledge of them gives one a sense of power. “The streets in New York City are their own country. Even when she wasn’t confined to a sick ward, she and her mother traveled into New York, day after day, for her chemotherapy or radiation. She conveys so well the aloneness of a sick child, at the mercy of hospital staff, and the effect of looking different from other people. Lucy Grealy’s memoir, Autobiography of a Face, is an account of her childhood and young adulthood struggling with surgeries, treatments, and disfigurement from Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare cancer of the jaw. She captures what it is like as a child and a young adult to be torn between two warring impulses: to feel that more than anything else we want to be loved for who we are, while wishing desperately and secretly to be perfect.“Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people. In this lyrical and strikingly candid memoir, Grealy tells her story of great suffering and remarkable strength without sentimentality and with considerable wit. It took her twenty years of living with a distorted self-image and more than thirty years of reconstructive procedures before she could come to terms with her appearance.

When she returned to school with a third of her jaw removed, she faced the cruel taunts of classmates. In this celebrated memoir and exploration of identity, cancer transforms the author’s face, childhood, and the rest of her life.Īt age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer. “It is impossible to read Autobiography of a Face without having your consciousness raised forever.” – Mirabella 'Grealy has turned her misfortune into a book that is engaging and engrossing, a story of grace as well as cruelty, and a demonstration of her own wit and style and class.'- Washington Post Book World

Grealy autobiography of a face