Autobiography of a face lucy grealy essays

Autobiography of a Face fail to notice Lucy Grealy is sketch extraordinary report, at soon innocent flourishing age 9, Lucy was diagnosed collect Ewing’s sarcoma, a unusual and most of the time fatal do of person that attacked her sickness required act to brush off a tertiary of counterpart jaw, followed by writer than glimmer and a half eld of dispersal, horrific chemotherapy treatments, title 15 eld of rehabilitative surgery.

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Lucy Grealy was an unsparing observer of human physiognomy. She was a poet, with the requisite eye for piercing detail, but her attention to personal appearance—and its effect on the observer—had a particularly bracing lack of euphemism. Here is her description of the person she calls “Dr. Woolf,” the pediatric oncologist who had administered chemotherapy to her: “Tall, large-featured, and balding, he had a peculiar large white spot on his forehead, which caught the light in an unflattering, sinister way. His nose was tremendous, his lips invisible. He scared me.”

Dr. Woolf appears in “Autobiography of a Face,” Grealy’s memoir, which recounts her arrival in his office after her diagnosis, at age nine, with Ewing’s sarcoma, a bone cancer that had caused a tumor in the right side of her jaw. Grealy describes her illness and its treatment (surgery, radiation, chemotherapy) with staunch fidelity to her child’s-eye view—which means that being sick seems at first like a chance to get out of school, that hospital stays hold out the promise of adventure, and that she has no idea what chemotherapy entails. The realization of the last arrives, with an overpowering force, only once Dr. Woolf has the needle in her arm. “I had never known it was possible to feel your organs, feel them t

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Lucy Grealy’s ‘Autobiography of a Face’

“Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people . . .”—Lucy Grealy

Lucy Grealy’s memoir, Autobiography of a Face, is an account of her childhood and young adulthood struggling with surgeries, treatments, and disfigurement from Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare cancer of the jaw. She conveys so well the aloneness of a sick child, at the mercy of hospital staff, and the effect of looking different from other people. Even when she wasn&#;t confined to a sick ward, she and her mother traveled into New York, day after day, for her chemotherapy or radiation.

“The streets in New York City are their own country. A knowledge of them gives one a sense of power. It makes no difference that for the most part New York is a giant grid, supremely traversable compared with such labyrinths as Paris or London. Its power heaves up from the pavement right in front of your eyes, steam escapes in fits and starts as if the whole place were going to blow any minute, people who have already blown apart lie in its crevasses, and all the while there is a thin promise, a slight wheedling tone, that something important, something drastic, is about to break.”

Grealy became wise in the ways of human weaknesses—cruelty,