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Grealy autobiography of a face5/21/2023 ![]() ![]() I don’t remember what drew me to the book, but I’m pretty sure it was simply the intriguing title and the prologue, “Pony Party.” ![]() When Autobiography of a Face was published in 1994, I was 23 years old and flailing around in my own little post-college world. I’d found myself in Lucy Grealy’s sentences. Skin grafts, bone grafts, tissue expanders, chemotherapy, and radiation, these are all physically painful, but it was the emotional agony that resonated with me: her throbbing, metaphysical pain.Īutobiography is a memoir about loss on multiple levels, but for me back then, it was simply about girlhood the insecure, low self-esteem, failer-of-every-Presidential-Physical-Fitness-Test-ever, misfit kind of girlhood I’d experienced too. In it, she dissects the pain endured by multiple surgeries to her face as a result of a Ewing’s Sarcoma discovered when she was just nine years old. Was this a metaphor for what Grealy’s book has meant to me? Why has it haunted me since I first read it in 1994?Īutobiography of a Face is an excavation of Grealy’s soul. How, I wondered, could I have allowed one of the most important books in my life to vanish? I found one copy, a reprint, and the last one on the shelf at a local, independent bookstore. I couldn’t find my 1994 edition in my own bookshelves (had I loaned it to someone?), I went to the Saratoga Springs library and it was listed as “lost” in the catalog. Just when I needed it, when I’d planned to write about Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy, for “Books We Can’t Quit,” the book quits me. ![]()
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