Autobiography of a Face
By Lucy Grealy
No one really gets to choose their personality. If you adopt something false, you become the person who is pretending to be someone else; avoiding something you know might define you will only set something else more in stone. Slight differences determine who you are as a person, how you are perceived by everyone, including the person standing in your mirror.
Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face begins with a chapter so defining, it felt like I had gone to elementary school with her. You can see the uncertainty of her childhood self through the eyes of an adult, looking on with the knowledge of a life long since lived. I was floored by how she weaved the imagery of sitting for medical photography within hiding her missing jaw from the photos at children’s birthday parties. Grealy creates these moments of childhood innocence, underscored with the burden of knowledge adult experience brings. The reader knows what these surgeries will put her through, what toll chemotherapy will take on her small body. She writes with an insight of her younger self that seems like it would be hard to grasp. Reflection that far back becomes fuzzy through the lens of time, but hers is trapped in amber throughout the pages of her recollection.
While suffering through a painful, life-altering experience, Lucy Grealy seems forever concerned for the other people in her life. She behaves with such conviction and bravery, all for the sake of sparing others from feeling bad for her. At times it could be for ego, but usually it’s legitimate caretaking for the parents and family of a childhood cancer patient. She wears wigs she doesn’t care for to make others feel good about their contribution to her experience, she does everything in her power not to cry through painful experiences so her mom won’t be embarrassed by the tears of a child experiencing hell itself. She is brought to a breaking point when given the option to spend money for herself and chooses a horse. Immediately you can feel the regret, empathizing unrelentingly with a child clinging to whatever might make her feel normal. The most heartbreaking parts of her story are never what she is going through, but those of the control she attempts to exert, making her life nuisance-free for others, while her face becomes an experimental playground for plastic surgeons.
Lucy Grealy’s story of growing up and living through unending medical treatment is told beautifully by the audiobook narrator Coleen Marlo. Marlo breathes reality into Grealy’s words, words that already feel so real on the page without the assistance of the voice bringing them to life. I had to stop midway through to make sure it wasn’t the author herself reading her own story. Whether audio or physical, Autobiography of a Face conjures the experience of a not-quite teen girl going through the graphic, physical reconstruction of her very face, at a time when most are trying to change the way they’re perceived through private, slight modifications for the microscope of their peers.