About this title: The author of this honest account underwent five years of treatment for a cancer that left her face disfigured. It took more than 30 reconstructive procedures before she could come to terms with her appearance. At a time when supermodels have become role models and many women seek physical perfection at any cost, Grealy's poignant memoir lends gravity and perspective to the concept of beauty in America.
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Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Date Published: 1995
ISBN-13:9780060976736ISBN:006097673X
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Minor fanning of front cover. One, small, corner curl. No creasing. Text is clean and bright. Binding is tight. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Date Published: 2003
ISBN-13:9780060569662ISBN:0060569662
Description: Very Good. First Edition. Slight cover wear with minor scuffing to edges. GoodwillnyBooks is committed to providing each customer with the highest standard of customer service. You may return new items within 30 days of delivery for a full refund. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Fair. Purchasing this book supports the King County Library System Foundation. Thriftbooks and KCLSF have partnered to help raise additional funds for the library system. Ex-Library book-will contain library markings. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Very good. Book has appearance of light use with no easily noticeable wear. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Very good. Book has appearance of light use with no easily noticeable wear. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Date Published: 1994
ISBN-13:9780395657805ISBN:0395657806
Description: Good in Good jacket. 156-W Books rated "Good" may have some notes, underlining, or highlighting. These books also may contain the previous owner's name, stamp, sticker, or gift inscription, or may be library discards. read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
"Appropriate 9-12th grade and above, and quoted from Publisher's Weekly, Diagnosed at age nine with Ewing's sarcoma, a cancer that severely disfigured her face, Grealy lost half her jaw, recovered after two and half years of chemotherapy and radiation, then underwent plastic surgery over the next 20 years to reconstruct her jaw. This harrowing, lyrical autobiographical memoir, which grew out of an award-winning article published in Harper's in 1993, is a striking meditation on the distorting effects of our culture's preoccupation with physical beauty. Extremely self-conscious and shy, Grealy endured insults and ostracism as a teenager in Spring Valley, N.Y. At Sarah Lawrence College in the mid-1980s, she discovered poetry as a vehicle for her pent-up emotions. During graduate school at the University of Iowa, she had a series of unsatisfying sexual affairs, hoping to prove she was lovable. No longer eligible for medical coverage, she moved to London to take advantage of Britain's socialized medicine, and underwent a 13-hour operation in Scotland. Grealy now lives in New York City. Her discovery that true beauty lies within makes this a wise and healing book."
"This is a sad but wonderfully well written account of a horrible -almost life long disease-and how the author coped with it throughout her life. It is an excellent follow up to Ann Patchett's "Truth and Beauty"."
"Ehm...at the risk of sounding completely cold, I did not like this book. I spent most of the book so consumed by frustration for Lucy's mother and Lucy's own perceptions that I couldn't allow myself to feel anything else for her.
Yes, she was a cancer survivor, and she was treated horribly by her peers growing up. But sometime after the large portion of her jaw was removed, she admits that she didn't even understand that she had had cancer until many years later! She thought that people stared at her because she had lost her hair due to chemotherapy, not because of the shape of her face. She spent so much time deluding herself into believing a warped reality that she lost out on a good portion of her life. She came off as horribly selfish when detailing her many hospital stays and her initial reaction upon finding out her father had been hospitalized (her chances of getting a pony diminished significantly at that time). She obsessed about being loved, but did not make a very strong case for her being an ideal recipient of love.
The mother was frustrating solely for her inability to "mother". Your daughter is sitting in front of you having poison pumped directly into her body, and you chastise her for crying? Then you remark on how disappointed you are at the fact that she's "letting the treatment bring you down"? Seriously, if there was ever a child who could have used a pat on the head and a comforting, "There, there", it was Lucy.
She tended to dwell on things, and that lead to unnecessarily long and detailed sections that could have been left out. If you ever wanted to know which flavor of pudding to consume for a more pleasingly aesthetic vomit, this book will tell you. It will also tell you how to induce pneumonia by inhaling your vomit. Yes...lots of vomit talk, which goes back to my original point - it really could have been left out.
The last thing I want to say is that I'm not so callous as to not feel sympathy for the things that Lucy had to deal with in her life. It couldn't have been easy. But, here's the thing. The back jacket should not have promised a novel that told her story "without sentimentality", because that's not the same book that I cracked open. If those passages on love, acceptance and her place in the world weren't an example of wallowing in the sentimental, I don't know what is."
"I just finished reading Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy. I originally got this book because I started out the year reading Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty: A Friendship, which is about Ann's friendship with Lucy. Lucy is a quite a colorful and tragic character in the book and I wanted to know more about her. I was also very curious to see what Lucy looked like because the subject of this book is her face, which was disfigured as a result of childhood cancer.
Her experiences with a disfigured face and the agonies and hardships caused by her cancer are the primary topics of this book. Her cancer treatment, which begins at age 9, is harrowing and heart-breaking. As a result of the treatments, a third of her jaw is removed--giving her a face that results in teasing, alienation and feelings of being unlovable. Two things struck me most about the book. One was how much she must have left out. She literally spent years having new procedures done to reconstruct her jaw and spent endless amounts of time in hospitals. Although you get a glimpse of what some of those operations and hospital stays were like, I can't even imagine what it must have been like to have been that sick for so long.
The second thing is how little information she seemed to have received about her various treatment and the lack of communication amongst her family. She writes several times about her mother's wish for her not to cry during chemotherapy and subsequent treatments: "If you pretend to be brave then you will be brave." What a burden to put on a child! She also writes about her father going into the hospital for stomach pains, but then he doesn't come home for months and virtually no one in the family goes to visit him except Lucy's mother. He ends up dying there--never returning home. Lucy goes to visit one time and then is ambushed by grief years later. One of the recurring themes of the book is how little her family talked about what was happening in their lives and how they felt--leading to so much unnecessary pain and misunderstandings. This is something I think so many of us can relate to--the things we leave unsaid to those we love the most.
Lucy's central struggle is to come to terms with her face and her concept of beauty and the question of whether someone with this kind of face can be loved. I think it is a struggle that we can all share--especially women. Physical beauty is so often correlated to being desirable and "lovable." But how many of us feel truly beautiful? How often have you felt undesirable because of how you looked? I know this is something I always struggle with (although it has gotten better in recent years). I think that once someone truly knows you as a person, they see the beauty within you and you do become beautiful and feel beautiful with them. But what about people you don't know? When all they are judging you on is how you look on the outside? I often feel so confident and good about myself and then will catch a glimpse of myself in a store window and go "Oh yuck. You look so ugly and dumpy and overweight." And all my good feelings about myself go down the drain.
Another thing that struck me as being universal about the book was Lucy's constant belief that with the next operation, her face would be "normal" again and then everything will be better. How often do we do this in life? "Once I make more money, things will be better." "Once I find someone to love me, things will be better." "Once I lose the weight, things will be better." We spend so much time thinking about how much better things will be if only this were true or that were true. And how often do we achieve something and find that things are still not better? At the end of the book--after a particularly long and extensive series of surgeries--Lucy realizes that her face is a normal as it is ever going to get. There will be no more surgeries, no more fixes. The man she is sitting with is only giving her positive reactions. She writes: "And then I experienced a moment of the freedom I'd been practicing for behind my Halloween mask all those years ago. As a child, I had expected my liberation to come from getting a new face to put on, but now I saw it came from shedding something, shedding my image. I used to think truth was eternal, that once I knew, once I saw, it would be with me forever, a constant by which everything else could be measured. I know now that this isn't so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things."
This is a not a fun, happy and breezy book, but it is thought-provoking and interesting. I would definitely recommend reading this book together with Ann Patchett's book as they complement each other very well. I wish I had read them closer together."
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