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 …