Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy chronicles her childhood battle with cancer and her lifelong battle with disfigurement. While she was cancer free not long after her diagnosis, she underwent reconstructive surgeries until she died at age 39 from a heroin overdose. While this book doesn’t contain her last few years of life, it tells the story of her childhood and adolescence with the wit, self-awareness, and intelligence of an adult.
Personally, my way of reading has always been stuck in the mimetic register. I am fully aware of the thematic register. I know how to close read. But maybe I’m guilty of this: when I’m reading something I know I don’t have to write a paper on, I shift into a passive mode. So I chose this book not only because I like memoirs, but because it would probably be easier to force myself OUT of the mimetic register. I already know that these things happened, so I won’t be as tempted to remain in the mimetic register and will have more opportunities for close reading. I think choosing this book also presents its challenges: how do we make a value graph and determine purposes, context, and controlling/counter ideas out of a true story? This belongs to somebody.
I think Lucy’s first surgery was the most telling, and I would argue that her controlling idea: she craved attention, and so she embraced being a sickly kid. That would make the counter idea what being sick entails: pain, discomfort, ugliness, awkwardness, and, most importantly, needles. Collectively, I will call this counter idea, sickliness.
The memoir begins with 9-year-old Lucy getting headbutted right in the jaw. Not ideal. This leads to a toothache and lockjaw and, eventually, a bony growth (but we’ll get there later). After the initial shoulder meeting jaw, Lucy got to miss school and had dreams of a diet of milkshakes, all making up for her having a jaw that may need wiring shut. After her initial doctor visit and the wrong diagnosis of a fractured jaw, Lucy was happy to be carted off in an ambulance. But, wait! When she got there, she actually had to have surgery. Before surgery, Lucy was ecstatic to be fussed over by doctors, nurses, and parents, being complimented on her bravery and behavior. Surgery time comes, and Lucy has to get injections and taste this horrible gas to make her go to sleep. Lucy was nervous, of course, but she was enamored by the sight of an operating room and the doctors and nurses all paying attention to her.
She resisted as much as she could to go to sleep so she could watch everything, but the medicine overpowered her. Lucy wakes up vomiting and exhausted and bothered by her nurse. Lucy’s first operation of many was finally over.
If read only mimetically, the reader has an awkward time figuring out whether they are sympathetic with Lucy (of course they are! She’s a kid with cancer!) or horrified by her nonchalant attitude and what resembles joy about her injury, surgery, and then cancer (Doesn’t she understand how wrong that is?!). Lucy writes, “I was vain and proud when it came to wanting to be different from everyone else. I wanted nothing more than to be special, and so far the role of patient had delivered” (Grealy 25). I think that’s a really important line to begin reading the text thematically. It shows Lucy’s dissociation from herself. She was no longer Lucy Grealy, the 9-year-old Irish immigrant who was really good at book reports. She was now Lucinda (all the doctors use your full name) the patient. Lucinda the disfigured kid. Lucinda, the subject of medical journals and survivor of Ewing’s Sarcoma.
Grealy, Lucy. Autobiography of a Face. New York: Harper Collins, 2003. Print.
How Writers Read... 
I would argue that the Controlling idea is: Ignorance leads to Interpretation, which leads to happiness. The Counter idea is: Ignorance leads to distorted reality, which leads to stunted personal growth. Lucy throughout her illness is not aided into a full understanding and seriousness of it. There are moments when adults want to tell her the reality of her situation but she refuses to hear it. This leads her into interpreting her case with the positive outlook of attention, presents, approval of strength and courage, and adventure. This distortion and her inability to acknowledge the full truth prevents her personal awareness and growth. I find that it is very difficult to read this for the controlling and counter ideas. Reading about another human’s experiences makes it easy to fall into the emotional aesthetic of the narrative. The reality causes the reader to respond realistically, reflecting on one’s own life, emotions, and circumstances in relation to Lucy. For myself it will be a challenge to overcome reading this mimetically. I more or less have a fear of doctors, reading about her procedures gives me anxiety. For example when Lucy described how she felt being given an inhalation sedation, I immediately responded emotionally to my own experience as as child. The challenge for me will be to remove my emotions from the page before all I see is myself and not Lucy.
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While I do agree with Darpino’s contextual idea to be close to the matter of ignorance does lead to a stunted personal growth, I think that it doesn’t fit well into the overall story. Now at the beginning, with the adults not explaining what is exactly wrong with her, it’s only been kept there, at the beginning. Over time the condition became aware to her, and as such, she ended up having to deal with it like any other person. If the controlling/contextual idea dealt with the ignorance of the character, shouldn’t the idea be present throughout? In the chapter I recently read through, Lucy explained what her life was like through her chemotherapy sessions, and at this point, she was no longer in the dark about it. She knew fully well what she was going through, and that she wasn’t the fully one. The ignorance has been thrown out the window. While I do believe that the idea does have some merit in the beginning of the story, I don’t believe it’s something that lasts throughout it.
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Lucy’s story is certainly complex, and it lends to plenty of different interpretations of what the theme or controlling idea could be. In the beginning, we definitely see Lucy as a child being ignorant of her situation (either by choice or by genuinely not knowing) and only viewing it for the positives— getting extensions on assignments, receiving unique attention, and the ability to brag about having gone through surgery. This kind of mindset is typical of a child, though it is important to keep in mind that this is the adult Lucy retelling the story of her younger self.
As we progress further in the book, however, the way that Lucy faces her situation shifts. By the time she starts chemotherapy treatments, Lucy starts to feel less special and unique and struggles more with freedom and who she is. The stress of being sick and going to the hospital to get treated starts to get to her much more than before, because instead of an exciting break from school and assignments, this starts to become an ongoing reality.
As I mentioned before, this story is the product of adult Lucy retelling her childhood. It’s possible that as an adult, Lucy doesn’t remember as much of the fear or stress of being sick as a child before she knew it was cancer, because it didn’t really solidify in her memory until she started chemotherapy. This stage signified a turning point in her life, so of course she would remember the shift in her feelings about it as happening around that time.
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