Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy
Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy
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Autobiography of a Face

Author: Lucy Grealy

Narrator: Coleen Marlo

Unabridged: 5 hr 55 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 09/06/2016


Synopsis

"I spent five years of my life being treated for cancer, but since then I've spent fifteen years being treated for nothing other than looking different from everyone else. It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly, that I always viewed as the great tragedy of my life. The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison."

At age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer. When she returned to school with a third of her jaw removed, she faced the cruel taunts of classmates. In this strikingly candid memoir, Grealy tells her story of great suffering and remarkable strength without sentimentality and with considerable wit. Vividly portraying the pain of peer rejection and the guilty pleasures of wanting to be special, Grealy captures with unique insight what it is like as a child and young adult to be torn between two warring impulses: to feel that more than anything else we want to be loved for who we are, while wishing desperately and secretly to be perfect.

About Lucy Grealy

Lucy Grealy, an award-winning poet, was born in Ireland in 1963. She lived in the U.K. and in Germany but spent most of her life in New York, where she grew up, and where she died in 2002. In addition to Autobiography of a Face, she published a collection of essays, As Seen on TV: Provocations.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Will on November 28, 2024

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, sh......more

Goodreads review by emma on January 23, 2023

this memoir was recommended to me by one of the best memoirs i've ever read in my life, which was very exciting but ultimately set up a tough comparison. lucy grealy is an excellent author, but her face was not the most interesting part of her. contrary to the title, i didn't want to know about her......more

Goodreads review by Doneen on June 05, 2014

I'm so glad I read this book after reading Ann Patchett's "Truth and Beauty," which was her take on the friendship between the two women. I came away from reading the first book with a very skewed idea of what the relationship was like. I didn't like Lucy Grealy at all--she came across as a self-inv......more

Goodreads review by Alexis on November 11, 2012

Lucy Grealy’s memoir AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE was met with wide critical and popular acclaim when published. The book is overrated in my opinion, and it provides a good test case for Vivian Gornick’s concepts of the “situation” and the “story.” “Every work of literature has both a situation and a sto......more