Lucy Grealy’s memoir AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE was met with wide critical and popular acclaim when published. The book is overrated in my opinion, and it provides a good test case for Vivian Gornick’s concepts of the “situation” and the “story.” “Every work of literature has both a situation and a story,” Gornick writes in her book THE SITUATION AND THE STORY. “The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say” (13). Grealy’s situation is compelling: as a young girl, she is diagnosed with the rare and formidable Ewing's Sarcoma and has an operation to remove the malignant tumor from her face. Her prognosis is dismal, and she is left with a disfigurement that makes her “ugly.” This sense of her own ugliness looms over her, and thus the story is about her unsurprising search for beauty and truth. Or, so she says. Grealy’s search for truth falls short for me, in part because I suspect that she was conflicted about her own truth at the time of the book's writing, but her search for beauty is a strong, well-developed theme. Her musings on beauty and ugliness, in fact, as well as her excellent descriptions of the alien hospital world, were what made me stick with this book when I wanted to put it down. What was missing for me on the whole was complex story development; her situation is dramatic, while the story lacks shape and texture—in many places. I suggest that this flatness has to do with the book’s early avoidance of the shadow side of her experience during the time of her diagnosis and early treatment. She doesn't engage with her own doubt. Here’s an example of this flatness from a passage set during her initial hospital stay:"This sense of comfort continued in the following days and weeks. There were definite problems to face here, but to me they seemed entirely manageable: lie still when you’re told, be brave. It didn’t seem like so much to ask, really, considering what I got in return: attention, absence from school, occasional presents, and,though I wouldn’t have articulated it, freedom from the tensions at home...Some of the other visiting parents, the ones who came in every day, felt sorry for my lack of visitors and sneaked me contraband food items. I played up to this expertly whenever I sensed a particularly orphan-sensitive audience. My mother would have been appalled if she’d known" (38).The problem I had with this scene and others like it is they struck me as disingenuous. She never develops these “tensions at home” any further, but since she continues to refer to fraught family relationships, we have to take her on her word. If part of her identity was that of emotional orphan or orphan of illness, she doesn’t illustrate the “becoming” of that identity. In fact, mom and dad seem pleasant, caring, and supportive, albeit fuzzy, as characters. If there are tensions at home, show the reader. I don’t doubt that parents could do their best, and a child could still feel differently, could feel lost and alien. But Grealy doesn’t take us through the formation of this important alienation that underpins the story.The flatness in the beginning is, I think, a problem of persona. Her early persona is one of a young girl trying to keep her chin up, to appear strong, and to avoid whining. While a perfectly believable pose for a child to adopt, a pose to spare her parents and to spare her shame, what she doesn’t write about is the underside of these exhausting heroics and overtures. We don’t get inside of how it felt to be her, struggling for strength in a time of what must have been unimaginable fear. In fact, her protestations against whininess come off as, well, whiny. The reader can be told that this conflict is heartbreaking, but we don’t feel it. She doesn’t let us deep inside the conflict—at least not initially. So for the first 50 or so pages, we are met with a somewhat unreliable narrator, one whom we suspect is holding back. When she does begin to share her conflicted interiority, it feels too late in the story.Another problem I had was Grealy's reliance on summary. There were plenty of interesting scenes, but we were held back from them frequently, or we were told what they meant or stood for. Grealy’s problems may well have to do with narrative distance and persona. The story is either too close or too far, and in both cases the effect is loss of clarity. One technical issue that contributed to this distance was her overuse of the conditional tense: “I would,” “We would", “they would.” This approach veers too easily toward summary, and the effect is one of drifting through generic time—what life was like generally. Grealy writes some scenes in simple past, too, but the conditional is overused in order to avoid climbing inside of discrete, crystalline moments. Perhaps it was too painful for the writer to do, but this approach distanced me from story.On the whole, I am glad I read the book. It did get better as she went; the insights became more felt, the persona more honest as she grappled with the mess inside. Grealy was at her best when grasping the minutiae of daily hospital life; here she seemed expert not only of a hidden world, but expert of herself, clear about her own responses to her peculiar alien existence. In these sections of the book, I felt the truth of what Gornick said about how clarity of persona energizes the story. Ultimately, I hope my criticisms of Grealy will help me puzzle out my own problems as a writer--narrative distance, time and tense, and compensating for story with capital-V voice.
I read Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty a while back and was intrigued by Greely’s story. I was excited to read Greely’s version (especially since there was such controversy between her family and Patchett). As a former student of physical attractiveness (my MA dealt with the mechanics and development of measuring facial physical attractiveness), I was curious to read about Greely’s experience. Unfortunately, I was disappointed.I think part of my disappointment in this book was due to my knowledge about Greely’s life from Patchett’s book. I was surprised that there was no mention of Patchett (at all). I was disappointed that Greely didn’t really discuss much of her adult life, but I was not completely surprised because Patchett describes Greely as having rushed to finish the book. It comes across this way; she spends 2/3s of the book from the age of 9-13 and then the last third rushes through college and grad school. I would have liked to know about Greely as an adult.I was also skeptical about some of her details (and this probably comes form some pre-conceived notions about Greely’s tendency to re-write history that I got from Patchett). Why does she not know her siblings’ ages? Why is she so flip about her mom never visiting and hating to come into the city only to describe in the next chapter about how her mom ALWAYS drove her to chemo and how her mom’s hospital visits were comforting because she (her mom) would just sit and knit and not expect to make conversation. Why is there no mention of her breast augmentation surgery? She presents herself as struggling with (but sort of ultimately rising above) her appearance, but she doesn’t mention her adult body modifications.I think I was most disappointed that she only mentioned her twin sister Sarah in passing. Frequently she wonders what she would have looked like if she hadn’t had cancer. I would assume that Sarah might provide a decent approximation (unless, of course that she and Sarah are fraternal, rather than identical, twins but she says so little about Sarah that the reader doesn’t even know this crucial detail). I was also curious about their friendship (or more likely lack of); aren’t twins supposed to be closer than normal siblings? Why is it that Lucy almost entirely omits Sarah from the book?Greely does have a few good observations and her use of language is certainly poetic. Some of the quotes that I liked were:“Anxiety and anticipation, I was to learn, are the essential ingredients in suffering from pain, as opposed to feeling pain pure and simple.”“Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people”“Everybody…was always looking at someone else’s life and envying it, wishing to occupy it. I wanted them to stop, to see how much they had already, how they had their health and their strength. I imagined how my life would be if I had half their fortune. Then I would catch myself, guilty of exactly the thing I was accusing others of.”“I discovered what it was to love people. There was an art to it, I discovered, which was not really all that different from the love that is necessary in the making of art. It required the effort of always seeing them for themselves and not as I wished them to be, of always striving to see the truth of them.”“most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things.”And, my favorite quote reminded me of the pain of labor. As I told my husband, it wasn’t so much the pain as that I couldn’t catch a break between contractions. Each time I was supposed to “rest”, I was instead gripped with the knowledge that the pain was gonna return (and soon). Greely captures this well with her description of the cycles of chemotherapy: “This presented a curious reversal of fear for me, because I already understood that with other types of pain the fear of not knowing about it usually brought about more suffering than the thing itself. This was different. This was dread. It wasn’t some unknown black thing hovering and threatening in the shadows; it had already revealed itself to me and, knowing that I knew I couldn’t escape, took its time stalking me.”Overall it is an interesting book, but I was disappointed in the scope. Rather than describer her life, Greely spends most of the time simply enumerating her surgeries and her life as a patient. I was hoping for a memoir and instead, this is a book about cancer and medical intervention.
Do You like book Autobiography Of A Face (2003)?
Grealy's memoir describes her battle with bone cancer in adolescence, the removal of half her jaw, her two-and-a-half years of radiation/chemo treatments, the string of surgeries to "fix" her face that lasted into her adulthood as each successive reconstruction was absorbed back into her body, and her attempts to be a model patient and keep her family happy by never showing emotion during the ordeal. It's a beautiful, well-written book exploring a young girl's struggle to reconcile her "ugly" appearance with her identity and self-esteem. Highly recommended. Read this, then read Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty, the story of Patchett's friendship with Grealy that continues the painful story after Autobiography of a Face ends and fills in backstory about Grealy's adult life and insecurities.
—sydney
Lucy has interesting ways of coping with her disfunctional family and the disfigurement of her face. I read this book because I read Ann Patchett's book " Truth and Beauty" and I was curious to see the story from Lucy's side. At first I was disappointed that Lucy did not talk about Ann. In fact she mentioned very little about her years at Grad school and the friends she made. She did not talk about making her way after grad school. Ann Patchett wrote an afterword to it and that explained about how Lucy had to narrow her topic, and that made sense. I do like reading about real people.
—Sally
this book knocked me for six (this, i'm told, is a cricket-based metaphor. the only other cricket-related sentence i know is "the sound of willow on leather," which english expats like simon use with a quiver in their voices. this has absolutely nothing to do with this review). lucy grealy writes about her experience with a severely crippling childhood cancer which, besides putting her through years of chemo and radiation therapy with accompanying nausea, pain, terror, ill-being, baldness, and missed classes, also ended up the chopping off of a good chunk of her face. she was 9. it is not clear to me how happy her childhood had been till then. maybe it's not clear to her, either. but it is abundantly clear that the narrator of this memoir had an excruciatingly painful life at least starting at the age of nine till when she died of a drug overdose at 39 (while i don't doubt that she had moments of relief and even happiness, very few of these moments make their appearance in this memoir, and when they do they are a set up for further, more devastating falls).the genius of this book is not the cancer narrative per se, but the narrative of a childhood trauma so powerful that it empties a soul from inside out and cuts away those tenuous, undefinable, yet essential resources that allow one to navigate life and find solace and comfort in the company of others and especially oneself. grealy's deepest disability is emotional.since lucy grealy has a fabulous way with words and with feelings and sees really deep inside her pain, she depicts her cancer in the context of a family life marred by great emotional abstinence and isolation. adults are not good to lucy. the doctor who gives her her weekly injections of chemotherapy is always on the phone (yes, he gives her chemo while talking on the phone to someone else) and relates to her as if she were an orange instead of a child. they don't even exchange a word. for three years.mom and dad, though obviously devoted to their children (if i remember correctly there are six of them, and lucy is a twin), fail to connect with lucy's pain either because they cannot deal with their own pain or because they are too ashamed and embarrassed (i.e. cannot deal with their own pain). by willing lucy's pain away and castigating her (gently but firmly) for complaining when she suffers, lucy's mother puts little lucy in a space in which pain is shameful and a sign of weakness. the adult author knows all too well that denying pain its devastation proliferates it and makes it fester, yet she can only look at the damage that was done and report on it. there is no transcendence in grealy's life. a lot is made of peers' teasing (i can't imagine such horrible and relentless teasing happening when/where i was a child; ostracizing, gawking, and isolating, sure, but teasing like that? i don't think so. did i grow up in fairyland?), while hardly any mention is made of siblings. where are lucy's siblings, where is her twin while she walks to school among jeerings and attacks? controversy arose when ann patchett published a memoir of her friendship with grealy. apparently patchett wasn't very kind to grealy's family. suellen grealy, lucy's older sister, felt moved to put out an angry article in defense of her family, her mother in particular. my review of this book has nothing to do with the reality of grealy's family, her siblings, her parents. it has to do only with the story the narrator of Autobiography of a Face tells us. she chooses to leave out her siblings and to depict her parents as emotionally unavailable. this has nothing to do with the reality of these things. nothing. anyone who misses this distinction does the grealy family the injustice suellen laments in her article. having said this, i also want to say that, within the story, the traumatic impact of lucy's cancer is exponentially magnified by the bad emotional handling she gets from parents and doctors. in this sense, this is a tremendous testimony to the power of context in the genesis of devastating trauma.
—jo
