For most of the early stages (maybe even years) of her disease and treatment, she has an almost blase attitude toward it all, takes things in stride, doesn’t really understand the significance of what’s going on even though adults try to hint at it. Lucy details the excruciating pain of chemotherapy while also conveying her childhood ignorance about the seriousness of what was going on. There is even a chapter where she and a hospital friend sort of con a hospital volunteer into taking them to see the animal lab and get somewhat traumatized by seeing the vivisected and caged animals.

It’s a window into another world, the friendships and hierarchies of hospital patients. She got Ewing’s sarcoma in her jaw as a child and spent lots and lots of time in the hospital. But I didn’t actually read the book until it was assigned for a class this past April.Īutobiography of a Face tells the story of Lucy’s struggles with her face. I was definitely looking for a personal connection because though my story is different from Lucy’s, I knew that getting inside the skin of someone else who’d grown up being very physically different was going to make me feel less alone. I was hungry for more of her work, and then once I found out a little bit about her story, I picked up her memoir. It was “The Country of Childhood” from her As Seen on TV essay collection, and it was about her experience becoming an American citizen (she was originally from Ireland).

As I said from my very first post, whether a post on here is about blindness or Breaking Bad or organic chemistry or a book review, I always want the underlying focus to be on storytelling.īefore reading Autobiography of a Face, I’d only read one thing by Lucy Grealy. I can almost guarantee there’ll also be some fiction reviews at some point. Since memoir and personal essay are some of my favorite genres to write and read and contemplate reading and writing, I thought I’d start putting up some reviews of different memoirs, and use that as a way to dig into discussing different aspects of writing.

An autobiography of a face