Companion to Ann Patchett's "Truth and Beauty": Autobiography of a Face

Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy

Fast Facts

• Autobiography of a Face is a memoir recounting Grealy's cancer diagnosis at age nine, the seemingly endless treatments and surgeries that followed, and Grealy's introspection and growth as she ultimately comes to terms with her appearance and her own definition of beauty
• The author, featured here:

• 260 pages, painfully sad but beautifully written - Grealy's background as a poet shines through
• Grealy's friendship with author Ann Patchett was the subject of Patchett's own memoir, Truth and Beauty
• A show case for Grealy's immense talent, highlighting our immense literary loss

Wanting to be Ann Patchett's best friend

Ann Patchett is one of my favorite writers, but I had never read her non-fiction until a year ago, when I stumbled upon someone's battered copy of Truth and Beauty in my apartment building's communal laundry room.  (Moving into an apartment building with my own washer/dryer has its benefits, but I have to say, I miss using laundry as an excuse to raid the lending library!)

I read Truth and Beauty over Christmas 2013,  in a Vermont hotel that pre-dates American independence (featuring the most comfortable beds known to man).  The snow was falling, my husband was snoring, and I read until my eyes were red and bleary, crying over Ann and Lucy.  

Does platonic friendship that intuitive, deep, and all-encompassing, really exist?  Why don't Ann Patchett and I have that same relationship, when I know in my heart of hearts that we should?  Is it wrong to feel jealous when the ending is such a tragic, heart-wrenching waste?  Just look at the two of them, rubbing it in all our faces.

Patchett's title is lifted from one of the chapters of Autobiography of a Face, and Truth and Beauty describes the publication of Grealy's memoir, the whirlwind press and Lucy's Today show appearance and celebrity dates that followed.  I put it on my "to read" list definitively with a recommendation from my best friend Ali (my memoir/non-fiction connoisseur,) and I finally bought it over Christmas 2014.

Summary of an Autobiography

Lucy Grealy is nine years old when she is hit in the face during dodgeball, and experiences such disproportionate pain in her jaw that she begins a series of doctor's visits that culminate in a diagnosis of Ewing's sarcoma.  It isn't until years later that she learns that this ailment was a rare form of bone cancer.

"I had cancer?" she asks her family, as someone in the kitchen dated an event as something that had happened "before Lucy had cancer."  "Of course you did, fool, what did you think you had?"  "I thought I had a Ewing's sarcoma."  "And what on earth do you think that is?"

A great deal of the book is devoted to Grealy's surgeries, some to remove the cancer and seemingly many more to reconstruct Grealy's jaw.  The aftermath of Grealy's illness is just as poignant as the frightening first chapters.  She grapples with personal loss and finding identity, as teenagers do, with the added burden that she barely recognizes the disfigured face in the mirror as her own.

Halloween becomes her favorite holiday, and a recurring theme of the book: she only truly feels free from the oppression of judgment behind a costume mask.  Her relationship to pain is complex, but no less complex than her relationship to body image and her struggles with leering classmates in the cruel jungle of middle and high school.

Gladly, the memoir ends on a positive note.  It feels as though Grealy's ability to find and create beauty in literature, poetry, college and graduate school friendships, and her hope that the next surgery will yield the appearance she wants, seem to leave her with some measure of personal peace.

Final Thoughts

The traumas in this memoir are hard to wrap one's head around, but Grealy's prose manages to still feel beautiful and even, incredibly at times, light.

Grealy crystallizes her experience so perfectly through her own child eyes that even though each paragraph is heartbreaking, there is also a sense that each hospital visit and each horrific round of chemotherapy is just her reality.  She is a young girl, and this trouble-maker roaming of hospital wings and going through surgery after surgery is simply what her childhood is - she knows no different.

Knowing from Truth and Beauty that Grealy later fell into surgery addiction and ultimately, heroin addiction, somewhat hampered my reading of Autobiography.  Still, I loved Grealy's insights as she grows up, gains self-awareness, and reflects on truth and beauty in light of her uniquely challenging experiences.