Lucy Grealy
Lucy Grealy, an award-winning poet, was born in Ireland in 1963. She lived in the UK and in Germany but spent most of her life in New York, where she grew up, and where she died in 2002. In addition to her acclaimed memoir, Autobiography of a Face (1994), she also published a collection of essays, As Seen on TV: Provocations (2001).
-
Autobiography of a FaceA Memoir
I stood there perfectly still, just as I had sat for countless medical photographs: full face, turn to the left, the right, now a three-quarter shot to the left. I took a certain pride in knowing the routine so well. I’ve even seen some of these medical photographs in publications. Curiously, those sterile, bright photos are easy for me to look at. For one thing, I know that only doctors look at them, and perhaps I’m even slightly proud that I’m such an interesting case, worthy of documentation. Or maybe I do not really think it is me sitting there, Case 3, figure 6-A.
Autobiography of a Face:A Memoir -
Autobiography of a FaceA Memoir
I rooted around in the cabinets and came up with a hand mirror and, with a bit of angling, looked for the first time at my right profile. I knew to expect a scar, but how had my face sunk in like that? I didn’t understand. Was it possible I’d looked this way for a while and was only just noticing it, or was this change very recent? More than the ugliness I felt, I was suddenly appalled at the notion that I’d been walking around unaware of something that was apparent to everyone else. A profound sense of shame consumed me.
Autobiography of a Face:A Memoir -
Autobiography of a FaceA Memoir
Because I was never going to have love (this realization, too painful to linger over, I embraced swiftly and finally), I cast myself in the role of Hero of Love. Instead of proving my worth on the chemotherapy table, I would become a hero through my understanding of the real beauty that existed in the world. I decided that it was my very ugliness that allowed me access to this other beauty. My face may have closed the door on love and beauty in their fleeting states, but didn’t my face also open me up to perceptions I might otherwise be blind to?
Autobiography of a Face:A Memoir
“Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face, published in 1994 when she was 31, has become a classic of this genre. Here indeed is a beautifully composed work of literature, a sequence of interlocking essays that explore the author's experiences as a survivor of a disfiguring facial cancer, making pathology a mirror of the human condition. Autobiography of a Face is also a moving meditation on ugliness and beauty, of particular significance in a culture obsessed with the outward self.” —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times
"Grealy has turned her misfortune into a book that is engaging and engrossing, a story of grace as well as cruelty." —The Washington Post [on Autobiography of a Face]
“Lucy Grealy can send up Manhattan literary culture, or she can break your heart describing her long-vanished brother's death certificate, [these] eclectic essays are illuminated by Grealy's blunt honesty and genre-smashing intelligence, as she weds stream-of-consciousness to cultural criticism (think Virginia Woolf meets Tom Wolfe).” —Elle [on As Seen on TV]
Selected Works
