Kirkus-style review: Autobiography of a Face

Autobiography of a Face, by Lucy Grealy

A gripping and candid reflection on an adolescence and adulthood marked by physical otherness, this memoir meditates on the competing urges to be the ‘right’ kind of beautiful and to be accepted as we are. 

As a fourth-grader, Lucy Grealy lost a third of her jaw in a surgical procedure to remove an Ewing’s sarcoma tumor that, by a matter of chance, had been found in the bone. In a matter of weeks, Lucy’s sense of normalcy was radically redefined as she embarked on a long and isolating path of chemotherapy treatments and reconstructive surgeries that extended for over four years beyond the initial diagnosis. Despite the multiple attempts to reconstruct her jaw, Lucy’s appearance was severely altered by the loss of facial bone. When her health finally permitted her return to school, the taunts of her peers became a constant reminder of the society that would reject her based on outward appearance. As the title implies, Grealy’s sense of self was overcome, at times, by her identification with her face. “I was my face, I was ugliness...” With simple and heartbreakingly honest prose, Grealy transports the reader to the mind of a young person in writing that feels at once intensely personal to Lucy and also familiar to the reader. This book is about more than one woman’s painful experience of visible otherness and her desire to feel content in her own body; Grealy’s words speak to a universal longing for acceptance and individuality in a society that demands both.