Autobiography of a Face

At fourteen years old, Lucy Grealy picked up the phone and called a local riding stable. She was looking for a job, something to do with the horses she loved. The woman on the other end said yes. Lucy hung up, thrilled. Her mother asked a strange question: "Are you sure they know you were sick?"

Lucy lied. She said she told them everything. But really, it hadn't occurred to her to mention cancer, or her face.

She was still what she calls "blissfully unaware."

This moment, from the prologue of *Autobiography of a Face*, captures Lucy before the world taught her to see herself the way others saw her. She had spent years in hospitals. She had endured surgeries that removed half her jaw. She had lost her hair to chemotherapy. But somehow, none of that had yet translated into shame about her appearance. She simply didn't think about it.

When she arrived at the stable, the other workers looked up. They saw her "pale and misshapen face," the strange triangular shape where her jaw should have been, the mouth that couldn't quite close. They were shocked. Lucy saw their shock. And for the first time, she began to understand.

That job at the stable became a brutal education. She took horses out to "pony parties," children's birthday celebrations at expensive suburban houses. The children stared. They whispered. They laughed. Lucy learned what she calls "the language of paranoia" — the assumption that every whisper is about the way you look, every laugh a joke at your expense. She started to feel what it meant to be an outsider, not just because of her face, but because of her family's money struggles, her mother's volatility, the sense that the Grealys were "not a normal family."

This is where the book begins — not with the diagnosis, but with the moment Lucy realized her face marked her as different. From there, she takes us back to the beginning, to trace how she got here.

At age nine, Lucy was an ordinary child, an "abysmal athlete" who collided with a classmate during a game of dodgeball. The collision caused a toothache that wouldn't go away. Her mother was angry — at the situation, the bother, the cost. Her father tried to lighten things by saying Lucy had "a cold in her tooth." But the next morning, she could barely open her jaw.

An x-ray revealed what doctors thought was a dental cyst. Surgery was scheduled. Six months later, her face swelled up, hot and infected. Emergency surgery followed. Only years later would Lucy learn that she had Ewing's sarcoma, a rare cancer with a five percent survival rate.

But at the time, Lucy didn't know she was dying. She thought being a patient made her special. She wanted "nothing more than to be special."

Her mother praised her for being brave. When Lucy didn't cry during procedures, her mother compared her favorably to her twin sister, Sarah, who "would have cried horrendously." Lucy was "courageous and didn't cry and thus was good." This equation — bravery equals goodness, crying equals failure — became a formula for love. Lucy internalized it completely.

She developed a strict code: "One had to be good. One must never complain or struggle. One must never, under any circumstances, show fear and, prime directive above all, one must never, ever cry."

The operation to remove half her jaw left her with a dramatic scar. She was proud of it, eager to show it off. As a tomboy who "dogmatically scorned any attempts to look pretty or girlish," she wasn't concerned about her appearance. The swelling was so severe that it hid the fact that half her jaw was gone. She felt special, different, chosen.

But then came the chemotherapy. Five days a week, every week, for two years. The radiation was easy. The chemo was not. Dr. Woolf, the oncologist, was "incredibly rude" and "gruff and unempathetic." During Lucy's first appointment, he applied the tourniquet so tightly that she began to cry. Her mother was disappointed in her. Why had she cried beforehand, before the needle even went in? Hadn't she always been so brave before?

Lucy recognized, even then, that her mother was acting "out of her own fear." She saw tears in her mother's eyes — "tears that would never fall." But knowing this didn't stop the shame. Each time she cried, she felt she had failed in some spiritual way, that she didn't deserve comfort.

The book explores the consequences of this emotional suppression. Lucy's search for beauty, love, and acceptance becomes the central thread of her life. She grows convinced that fixing her face will fix everything — that if she could just look normal, people would love her, and she could finally feel whole.

But this is a memoir about what happens when you get what you think you want. It's about the operations that fail and the ones that succeed, about the friends who accept her and the lovers who don't stay, about the moment she finally looks in the mirror and cannot recognize the face looking back.

So how does a nine-year-old who loves being special become a teenager ashamed of her own reflection? How does a girl who never thinks about her appearance learn to see herself as ugly? And what does it take, after years of surgeries and shame and suppression, to finally recognize yourself?