THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 20, 1994 TAG: 9411170684
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY ANN G. SJOERDSMA
LENGTH: Medium: 51 lines
Surprisingly, the value of poet Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face, which chronicles her struggle with cancer of the jaw and years of facial disfigurement, is not found within her many ruminations on the nature of beauty. As expected, beauty, and the human celebration, envy and awe of it, receives intelligent and thorough scrutiny here. But it is Grealy's emerging writer's spirit - the separateness that would have been hers, I believe, regardless of the disease - that gives Face, an angry, alienating and sad memoir, its strength and meaning.
Grealy, who emigrated in the 1960s to New York from Ireland with her parents and four siblings, one of them her twin, when she was 4, was diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma at age 9. A scrappy tomboy not inclined toward schoolwork, she at first welcomed hospitalization and medical treatment as signs of her ``specialness,'' even after surgery to remove half of her jaw turned her into an object of playground ridicule. It was not until years later that Grealy, tough in the face of taunts and unaware of how much her emotionally dysfunctional family - her parents repeatedly abandoned her to lonely anguish - had harmed her, learned how sick she really was: Ewing's has a 5 percent survival rate.
It is not the cancer that disturbs Grealy, however. It is her ugliness. From a painful childhood of weekly chemotherapy, she grows into adolescent and teen years filled with lunchroom torment, facial cover-up and reconstructive surgeries - 30 operations, numerous skin grafts that didn't take, in 18 years. Over time, she internalizes the shame and rejection she feels into a paralyzing fear of never being loved. Still later, she comes to see her ugliness as a means to spiritual and intellectual enlightenment, to her own ``beauty.''
Although Grealy speaks profoundly about people's shallow obsession with beauty, especially with a woman's face, she speaks from a far-off emotional distance, often with a choppy, inappropriate affect. She is ruthlessly self-analytical, demanding and critical, and not easy to like. I can only imagine the depth of her poet's voice, and I eagerly anticipate her telling me more. MEMO: Ann G. Sjoerdsma is book editor for The Virginian-Pilot and The
Ledger-Star. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket design by MICHAELA SULLIVAN
Jacket photo by ALEN MACWEENEY
by CNB