Primerna autobiography of a face

Summary and Study Guide

Overview

Published in , Autobiography of a Face is award-winning poet Lucy Grealy’s prose debut, a widely-celebrated memoir concerning the author’s struggles with cancer and disfigurement.

At the age of 9, Lucy collides with a classmate during a game of dodgeball. The subsequent toothache leads her to seek medical assistance and doctors discover that she has Ewing’s sarcoma, a form of cancer with a 5% survival rate. She undergoes an operation to remove half of her jaw, which is followed by two-and-a-half years of chemotherapy and radiation treatment. Unsure how else to support her daughter, Lucy’s mother repeatedly encourages her to be brave and not cry during these unpleasant treatments and often chastises her when she does weep, leading Lucy to begin suppressing her emotions and masking her pain and fear, in order to win her mother’s approval and love.

At school, Lucy is regularly teased and bullied for her disfigured face and the baldness caused by her chemotherapy treatment. Gradually, the taunts begin to affect her, making her self-conscious and anxious about her appearance, something she had not considered before being exposed to the

Autobiography of a Face

November 29,
At an early age, Lucy Grealy was found to have a rare form of cancer. It would define the rest of her life. A third of her jawbone was removed to try to stem the spread of this cancer. She endured two and a half years of chemotherapy and many subsequent years of radiation treatments. In addition, she had literally dozens of surgeries attempting to restore her face. Each time her body would eventually absorb transplanted material and sag back in on itself. Consider the garden-variety cruelty of middle-schoolers. Then add to it a severe facial disfigurement. The taunting and insults were constant. High school offered minimal relief. One benefit to Grealy of her many hospitalizations was that she got to skip so much school-time, so much taunting-time.

Autobiography of a Face is Grealy’s memoir of her experience, inner and outer. She offers a blow-by-blow recounting of her medical trials, accompanied by the emotional turmoil that inevitably resulted. How does one cope with a world that defines beauty as value when one is clearly damaged? Eventually, Grealy decided that she would become deep. If she could not succeed at being beautiful, fac

Autobiography of a face

Reviewer:TreeFacts- favoritefavoritefavorite- February 11,
Subject:Pretty Good

I like this book, I like Lucy's writing style, you can tell she likes poetry. Nothing against the book, but I would like it more were it not assigned to me for a project. This, along with Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett (which I highly recommend reading along with this to get a much more vivid picture of Lucy's life), is a pretty nice story. If you want to delve even further into Lucy's story, I suggest a short article by her older sister Suellen that was written shortly after Truth & Beauty was published (18 months after Lucy's death) called Hijacked by Grief. All in all, I'm using this to procrastinate a looming essay doomed to be submitted in a few hours. But uh, yeah, pretty good

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Written by Ratna Bajpai

Grealy's memoir is a sensitive account of the relationship between physical appearance and self-esteem. It is a story of courage and resilience in the face of adversity. It describes the psychological, social, and cultural implications of an ailment.

At nine years of age, Lucy loses half her jaw to Ewing's sarcoma. In the early stages of the disease and treatment, she does not comprehend the significance or the implications of her condition. After more than two years of surgeries, radiation treatment, and intensive chemotherapy, she realizes the impact of the illness and disfigurement. The narrative incorporates several childhood events. Her awareness of people staring at her face, her attempts to hide her face with her hair, and a feeling of joy on Halloween, when she could mask her face are heart-wrenching.

The book describes the impact of Lucy's disease on her family relationships. Lucy belongs to an Irish immigrant family that cop

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