Lucy Grealy's "Autobiography of a Face"

Irish/American award winning poet & memoirist Lucy Grealy (b Ireland 1963-02) has written a candid and absorbing auto-biography describing her consuming torment & self-loathing after surgery & treatment for cancer at age 9 left her face terribly disfigured.  The surgery necessitated the removal of a major portion of her lower jaw.  The next 15 years were consumed with multiple surgeries and permanent scaring from cruel comments & humiliating stares at her grossly misshapen face.  Grealy explores her feelings for the many years of feeling ostracized & unworthy of love because of her hideous face.  "I had lost out on the world of love only because of my looks."  Being ugly for Grealy meant a perpetual fear of being alone and isolated. Her attempts to feel gratitude did not suffice to stave off depression & misery.  The burden of being an outcast are marked by highlighted turning points in her life.  These cause us to pondering unassuming events that befall us yet mark profound impact on our lives.   The epiphanous moments jolting Grealy into reckoning how her life would play out strike a sharp cord within us.  She recalls the definitive moments in time when she believed she'd never have a boyfriend, acknowledged others the right to torment her and accepted a world in which ease & normalcy were not meant for her.  Sometimes, the subtlest moments descend upon us forging the way we perceive our lives.  Sometimes it's as impossible to reconcile the past as it is to foresee the future.  Grealy's writing is scathing, poetic and painful.  Grealy confronts our feelings of empathy, shame and insecurity.  "Autobiography of a Face" is a stark awakening of human foibles and the good fortunes taken for granted.  We're counseled against postponing happiness pending wishful circumstances.  Grealy discovers "Joy was a kind of fearlessness, a letting go of expectations that the world should be anything other than what it was."