She’s almost proud to be the girl with the biggest problem in her hospital wing. They didn’t mean to cause so much hurt, but the “what’s wrong with her eyes question” was like a kick in the gut every single time.Īs Grealy grows older, she compares her facial disfigurement to the ailments of other girls who land in hospital beds next to her as she endures agonizing surgery after agonizing surgery.

The book begins with a young Grealy who, after having one-third of her jaw removed, is taking the horses she worked with to a birthday party for “perfectly formed” children and feeling her stomach in knots as she waited for the inevitable question that would surely come from some child: “What’s wrong with her face?”Īs someone who grew up cross-eyed, I remember absolutely hating children when I was a pre-teen.

I found Autobiography of a Face to be consistently relatable. But as Grealy explains: “that memory has significance because of the way my life has unfolded.” Today it seems as though time stopped while I sipped my red wine and Jeff slipped away to the bathroom to cough up his oyster. Like Grealy, my memory of that moment is more pivotal than the moment actually was. It seems like only two scenes later (in fact it was just four months later) that we were saying goodbye to him as he died of complications from esophageal cancer.

I remember when my late partner popped an oyster into his mouth at happy hour and then couldn’t swallow it. I can relate to looking back at an innocent moment that would later reverberate like a tragic movie plot. There would be many surgeries to follow and multiple misdiagnoses before they would find the cancer that would change her life – and her face forever. Grealy is describing the moment when a collision during an innocent childhood game knocked her to the asphalt of her primary school, and she felt – for the first time – a pain in her jaw. In everyday life, where we cough often and are always bumping into people, our daily actions rarely reverberate so lucidly.” – Lucy Grealy “When a film’s heroine innocently coughs, you know that two scenes later, at most, she’ll be in an oxygen tent when a man bumps into a woman at the train station, you know that man will become the woman’s lover and/or murderer.

Lucy grealy