Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy

Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a rare & most often times fatal cancer, Ewing Sarcoma, in her left jaw @ age 9.  Lucy endured 5 years of cancer treatment and underwent 30 reconstructive surgeries on her face.  Her initial cancer surgery removed most of her left jaw, leaving her terribly disfigured, or in her words "repulsive."  Lucy talks about her idenity being "…my face, my ugliness.  I was my face."  We sympathize with Lucy's isolation, depression & torture she suffered from the hands of her doctors & the cruelty of her peers.  However, I would not categorize her bio as a book of self-pity.  Rather, this is a beautifully written book of self-awareness & growth.   She writes with sensual abandon the love she had in caring for her horses and their total disregard for her appearance.  I was tuned to her philosophical quest for love & its meaning.  In her college years Lucy formed deep friendships.  "Through them I discovered what it was to love people.  There was an art to it, I discovered, which was not really all that different from the love that is necessary in the making of art.  It required the effort of always seeing them for themselves and not as I wish them to be."  Reading Lucy's autobiography dissolve away her physical constrictions & draw you deep into her poetic soul.  "I used to think truth was eternal…most truths are inherently unretainable, we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things."