Autobiography of a Face

Lucy Grealy tells a story about not fitting in, unbearable pain that takes up residence in one's head as loneliness and confusion, questioning what things mean, being scared and lost in your family, enduring intense physical pain, and most importantly, figuring out who you are. Lucy had no idea she might die, even though the survival rate for Ewing's sarcoma was only five percent. She does not present her parents as overly afraid for her life, either. Her autobiography is not a story about the fear of death, but about such courage and anguish. Lucy shows how she falls under the spell of her disability, allowing it to control her life and dictate her future to a greater extent than it would otherwise. Having a disability means that sometimes you have to say "I'm disabled, therefore I can't...", but as Lucy finally learns, it also means sometimes saying "I'm disabled, but I can!" Through her traumatic tale of misfortune, she has sifted out truths about beauty, the public, and self-concept.

Lucy's description of her early disease is particularly upsetting. Her family, overwhelmed by financial and emotional turmoil because of the stress of her illness, is not as visible as the part they actually played. Lucy's mother was a somewhat blurred figure who seemed to disappear by the middle of the book and portrayed her father as a particularly vague individual. However, the day-to-day trappings of illness force her to rely on her mother, whose relationship is one of the most disturbed, and moving. Early on she comments that when she was a child she didn't understand that her mother's anger was caused by depression, but she never elaborates on this observation. Her mother compares being brave with being good, and says: "At a time when everything in my family was unpredictable and dysfunctional... here I had been supplied with a formula of behavior for gaining acceptance and, I believed, love. All I had to do was perform heroically and I could personally save my entire family." Her words to Lucy to be brave, not to cry and not to give in to suffering and pain, only added to Lucy's burdens. Yet, one feels deeply sad for her simply because she is a mother with five children, a job, and constant money problems. She was a victim of depression even before Lucy's illness, driving into the city five days a week for Lucy's chemotherapy and radiation treatments, watching her child suffer day after day. A strong sense of satisfaction came when Lucy describes the joy and delight she felt on the fourth day following her weekly chemo treatments. With all her suffering, Lucy was awakened to all the glories of living to which we remain unaware of so much of the time. Lucy also exhibits a sensible, mature understanding of her father. She realizes he left her alone during her terrifying and traumatizing treatments with a completely heartless and hateful physician only because of his own inability to deal with and accept the type of pain his own daughter was experiencing. Through these extraordinary events, the family, overwhelmed by shock and shame, abandoned Lucy emotionally.

The cruelty of children is something we all can relate to, but under the circumstances Lucy was experiencing, it was outright inexcusable. From the boys in the lunchroom, to the drunken men in the railroad dining car, and the "how'd you get so ugly", these instances contributed directly to Lucy's self-perception. At school her disfigurement causes her to be constantly harassed and she is forced to eat her lunch alone in the career guidance counselor's office. "I felt safe and secure in that office, but I also felt lonely, and for the very first time I definitively identified the source of my unhappiness as being ugly." Once after one of her many operations, she has a conversation with a woman who is having a mastectomy. At first, Lucy felt unsympathetic because she saw a breast more hidden than a face. Lucy eventually realizes the woman's suffering and says, "Her feelings of ugliness consumed her as much as mine consumed me...but there was no doubt she was beautiful. Her problems lay in her perception". At 10, she began to mature emotionally at a rate uncommon to children facing a catastrophic loss. She tells of receiving solace and understanding more from a seriously ill asthmatic boy from a troubled family than from her own family. The years of cruel school taunting and reconstructive surgeries finally took their toll. Brilliantly explaining the pain of being rejected by her classmates