Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 27, 1994 TAG: 9411290057
SECTION: BOOKS PAGE: F6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY LUCY LEE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
When I first heard about Lucy Grealy's autobiography, I did not want to read it. The facts of her life were just too depressing: At age 9, she lost half her jaw to cancer and, in the ensuing years, underwent almost 30 operations to treat the cancer and rebuild her face. Growing up in a society that equated female worth with beauty left her with severe emotional as well as physical scars.
I changed my mind when I saw Grealy featured in the October editions of Vogue and Mirabella magazines. I wondered how one who once claimed to be "guilty of the crime of ugliness" was suddenly an authority on beauty. She is now 31 years old and an award-winning poet. She still doesn't have a "normal" face.
Grealy explains her situation this way: "I spent five years of my life being treated for cancer, but since then I've spent fifteen years being treated for nothing other than looking different from everyone else. It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly, that I always viewed as the great tragedy in my life. The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison."
The way Lucy lived those 20 years constitutes a primer in personal heroism. She learned early on that anxiety and anticipation, rather than pain itself, caused suffering. She, therefore, became "a machine for disassembling fear." She found, too, that "Pain, if nothing else, was honest and open - you knew exactly what you were dealing with."
Not much else in her life was that clear cut.
Family relationships, already tense, became more so because of her sickness. She felt guilty for causing her parents pain and trouble. Her mother had to leave her job at noon every day to make the hourlong drive into New York City for Lucy's radiation treatments and chemotherapy. They did this five days a week for two years, then once a week for another six months. Each time they were kept waiting at least two hours by their truly abominable doctor. (This is not a book the medical profession will be promoting.)
Her mother admonished her to never show fear and, above all, to never cry. Although Lucy rarely did cry, the inevitable slip-ups made her feel that she had let her mother down; that she was not only a failure but a bad person.
School was a nightmare. The boys taunted her daily - in the classroom, the hallways, and, especially, in the lunchroom. When she could stand it no longer, she went to the school counselor (the only time she complained throughout the book). He offered to let her eat alone in his office while he was at lunch. Although this granted a reprieve of sorts, she felt her ugliness and loneliness so keenly she was almost glad to re-enter chemotherapy (which meant extended absences from school).
One of the miracles of Lucy's story is that, despite the tragic unfolding of her adolescent and teen-age years, she was not bitter. She persuaded herself that she was lucky compared to some of the patients she saw during her many hospital stays. She even experienced occasional joy. Each week during her chemotherapy, "with the first glimmer of returning strength after the days of vomiting, I discovered that, for me, joy could be measured in negative terms: of what I didn't have, which was pain and weakness."
From this insight grew wisdom: "My greatest happiness wasn't acquired through effort but was something I already had, deep and sonorous inside of me, found through a process of removing the walls of pain around it."
Lucy's life improved when she began college and discovered poetry. She was able to use language as a means of entering the world. Words and images became "vessels for the truth and beauty I had so long hungered for."
Her talent with language is evident on every page of this book. The writing is taut, honest and without sentimentality or self-pity. Grealy relates her pain so clearly and matter-of-factly, I found myself protesting aloud. Her prose is powerful in its simplicity. It commands respect, as does the author.
In college Lucy made close friends-an art she decided took the same kind of love that was necessary in creating poetry. "It required the effort of always seeing them for themselves and not as I wished them to be, of always striving to see the truth of them."
She continued to have bone grafts to fill in her jaw, but each one was eventually reabsorbed by her body. Her face still determined her identity. She always felt that her life would be fixed with the next operation - that, then, her life would begin.
When the last operation finally "worked," however, Lucy still didn't feel attractive. "Where was all that relief and freedom that I thought came with beauty?" she wondered. Her long "journey to her face," i.e., her self, continued until she finally realized her liberation would not come from acquiring a new face but from shedding an old image.
The completion of this journey is what enables her today to pose in fashion magazines and to speak with authority on beauty. It is no casual statement when she says, "To remain sane, we have to know that our faces alone do not define us."
Lucy Grealy is a wise and strong woman. She is also truly beautiful.
Lucy Lee is a student of women's history and an advocate for women's rights.
by CNB