In this memoir Lucy Grealy tells us about her battle with cancer and it’s result, facial disfigurement. This leads her into a continuous struggle with beauty, love, and identity.
Beginning to read her memoir the readerly role I immediately fell under was one of sympathy. This poor girl, I feel sorry for her, I can’t imagine nor want to imagine my own life as her own. At this early stage in the story it is primarily Lucy the child narrating, this child does not call the addressee to be sympathetic. As a child there was an element of excitement, getting out of school, receiving attention, feeling important, and praised for bravery, for not crying. These qualities do not call for sympathy but rather empathy.
Lack of Empathy
Afterword taking on an empathetic role I also took on another readerly role. What I encountered was not wanting to listen to the horrors of her treatments from childhood to adulthood, because they are personally frightening to me. I was resistant to hearing every little detail of the treatments. I was resistant to being empathetic because it triggered in me a personal relational response of understanding. I wanted to avoid this empathy because of the anxiety it gave me. She does not call the audience to overshadow her story with projections of themselves.
In each role I played I had an inauthentic understanding of the role the narrator called me to take. To be sympathetic, to look away in self reflection, are surely not roles Lucy calls for her audience.
Lucy calls her audience to look past the superficial elements, her cancer, her constantly disturbed physical state. When Lucy presents longing for, and questions about beauty, love, and identity she helps us submit to the idea of her internal disfigurement rather than her physical disfigurement. Over and over Lucy presents us with her shamed identity, for example she states “…I was too horrible to look at, that I wasn’t worthy of being looked at, that my ugliness was equal to a great personal failure”(p.184)
Believes she’s a failure because she doesn’t have a beautiful face.
In reflection on love Lucy says “…fear kept insisting that I needed someone else’s longing to believe in that love”(p. 212). Submitting to the understanding of her internal disfigurement impacts the addressee in understanding where her identity lies, which is her face. It is the autobiography of her face, this identity that tells us it’s story and struggle for beauty. Taking the readerly role Lucy wants her audience to take enables us to uncover that her true identity is disfigured by the face, therefore it can not surface or overcome till the image is gone.
Another narrator addressee relationship that occurs is when Lucy finds people starring at her. As a teenager when she did pony parties parents would glance at her and quickly look away. She would interpellate by pausing by them, forcing them to look. She called them to see her as dangerous, that what happened to her could happen to their child. The parents as the addressee would continue to glance away and not directly communicate with her. After three years of doing her job no one ever sought to understand her, to really look at her, “they were uncomfortable because of my face”.
How Writers Read... 
I think Lucy asks and requires of her readers to be sympathetic and empathetic. Lucy made it very clear that she craves attention, so it wouldn’t be completely off base to assume that she wrote as a way to get attention.
Since this is a memoir, I think we could also argue that Lucy plays the role as narrator and addressee at times. She uses her writing as a way to reflect and make sense of things and work through her life story.
Lucy also narrates in a way to help others, whether it’s because they live in a situation similar to hers or she wants people who don’t understand to at least try. This would make her addressees better and more understanding people.
I also notice Lucy interpellate her audience on many occasions, especially by the end of the book where she’s wrapping things up: her story, her purpose, her reflection. In fact, she seems self aware of her interpellation at points. She writes that when she was reading and studying, she would “feel that something important and necessary was being said here, but the moment I tried to examine the words, dissect the sentences, the meaning receded” (Grealy 189). I think that’s how readers of this book feel sometimes. I know I did. We understand Lucy’s narrative on a plot level, the order of events, etc. It’s hard to figure out what she needs from us sometimes.
Lucy was just a normal woman with an abnormal story, yet her book was wildly successful anyway. She did something right by her addressees.
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