A Synopsis of Lucy Grealy’s Biography

The Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy is an autobiography of a girl who turns her misfortune into an encouraging story that is engaging and engrossing. 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 her classmates. She spent the next twenty years being treated differently for "looking different" from the rest of the world. Yet with all the hardships in her life, Grealy overcame childhood cancer, permanent disfigurement, and ultimately the deep bottomless grief called ugliness; she learned to embrace her inner self and true beauty.

Lucy Grealy was born in Ireland. Her family consisted of her parents, her two older brothers, an older sister, twin sister, and Lucy herself. Grealy's family had immigrated to America and Sarah, Lucy's twin sister, and Lucy were four. Lucy's life was perfectly normal until a simple accident in fourth grade, when the right side of her jaw collided with Joni Friedman's head in Physical Education. Because of this pure accident, Lucy Grealy's life was completely changed. At the age of nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer called Ewing's sarcoma, in which the reasonable chance of survival was given at five percent.

Thanks to radical surgery involving the removal of third of her jaw and years of radiation and chemotherapy, Lucy Grealy recovered from her disease, despite its low survival odds. However, the physical pain she suffered turned out to be far easier to endure than her sense of disfigurement and her isolation from other children. In high school, Lucy's worst fears came true. Everyday, she was teased by a group of boys about the way she looked. Often after her daily meeting with them, she only ended up hating herself. Lucy became convinced that only facial reconstruction and a restored appearance would make life bearable.

When Lucy looked in the mirror after the first reconstructive surgery, a large strip of foreign skin repulsed her. She looked forward to the next operation, the one that she thought would fix this one. Yet, she knew better not to expect perfection. After repeated reabsorption of grafts of skin and bone, Lucy Grealy reflected: "How could I pass up the possibility that it might work, that at long last I might finally fix my face, fix my life, my soul?" And repeatedly, she promised herself: "When my face gets fixed, then I'll start living".

During her senior year of high school, Lucy applied to and was accepted at Sarah Lawrence College with generous scholarship. After signing up for a poetry course, reading and writing poetry brought together everything that had ever been important to Lucy. She thought that language itself, words and images, could be wrought and shaped into vessels for the truths and beauty she had long hungered for. Finally, after 18 years and almost 30 operations, Lucy succeeded. When congratulated on her new face, Lucy found herself reluctant to examine it in the mirror. "Without another operation to hang all my hopes on," she reflected, "I was completely on my own. And now something inside me started to miss me."

For Lucy, the transformation was a curiously mixed blessing, a death as well as a rebirth. For so much of her life, she had handed herself over to others, for definition, for judgment, in hopes of remedy and ratification, that her first feelings were those of emptiness and facelessness. Although she has suffered through hardships since age of nine, her striving for acceptance taught her to love the true beauty inside of her.