Autobiography of a Face - Hardcover

Grealy, Lucy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395657806 ISBN 13: 9780395657805

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994

Synopsis

With eloquent candor, a woman who in childhood endured a severly disfiguring cancer offers a meditation on the pain, and healing she has endured, searching through a culture obsessed with physical beauty for love, acceptance, and inner peace. Tour.

About this title

Review:

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 pleasure 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

From the Back Cover:

 A New York Times Notable Book

“Engaging and engrossing, a story of grace as well as cruelty, and a demonstration of [Grealy’s] own wit and style and class.”—Washington Post Book World

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. It took her twenty years of living with a distorted self-image and more than thirty reconstructive procedures before she could come to terms with her appearance. In this lyrical and strikingly candid memoir, Grealy tells her story of great suffering and remarkable strength without sentimentality and with considerable wit. She 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.

“[A] book that shares what it’s like to be really different from other people . . . With exquisite prose and steely strength.”—USA Today

LUCY GREALY (1963–2002) was an award-winning poet and a memoirist. In addition to Autobiography of a Face, she was the author of the essay collection As Seen on TV: Provocations.
 

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0395657806
• ISBN 13: 9780395657805
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 223