Grealy, Lucy. Autobiography of a Face. New York: Perennial, 2003. Print.
In How Writers Read, I chose for my group to read Lucy Grealy’s memoir, Autobiography of a Face. It is about her journey from childhood to young adulthood through her cancer treatments, reconstructive surgeries, and the relationships, both with others and herself, built around her life as the girl with THAT face. Lucy was diagnosed with Ewing’s Sarcoma at the age of 9 and had to have a portion of her jaw removed, causing her face to be asymmetrical and disfigured. What followed was radiation and chemotherapy treatments and dental surgeries, which further disintegrated her jaw. Once Lucy was in remission, she was often a receiving plastic surgery to attempt to restructure her face to a more “normal” shape.
Childhood Lucy seemed to thrive in the “sick kid” environment. She loved the attention, and she finally felt unique and different. She didn’t realize that she looked different or wrong. As a kid, what one looks like doesn’t matter so much. Grealy discusses how this changes as she grows up: suddenly, her self-worth is directly correlated to how she looks and how she feels about how she looks. Suddenly, looking and feeling different is the worst possible thing that could happen, and because of this, any attention is unwanted. For most of her life, Lucy sought validation from people, often struggling with figuring out if she wants to be unique and view her face as a “badge of honor” or if it would be simpler to just be beautiful. Lucy does grow up to find herself in other ways – as a writer, an inventor of stories, most importantly. However, Lucy never actually accepts or feels good about her face, but to survive, she had to come to terms with the fact that her face will never be normal and she will never feel normal, no matter how many surgeries or diversion tactics she tries.
Sick kids, tangibly painful imagery, death, middle school. There is a whole lot of feeling (read: sadness, anger, angst) going on within this story. When I initially proposed this book, I wanted to read it to get in touch with mimesis, immersing myself in what the author had to say and imagining myself as if I am part of the story, witnessing it through my own eyes. Generally, this is what I “read for.” Of course, before reading, I had no idea what Grealy’s poetic prose would reveal beneath the surface and between the lines.
I won’t lie, though. I had a difficult time getting there.
Working through the controlling values was, is, difficult, and the ones I came up the first time around are certainly trashed at this point. Mckee argues that every text has a “controlling idea” that is like a theme: it “names a story’s root or central idea, but it also implies function: The Controlling Idea shapes the writer’s strategic choices” (115). My group and I have determined that these are the thoughts and processes under which Lucy Grealy operated to write her memoir. Readers begin the novel with a counter idea, which, according to Mckee, acts as an opposite force to the Controlling Idea (118). It features a childhood Lucy reveling in her differences and leveraging them to absorb as much attention, affection, satisfaction, security, and superiority and special treatment as she could. To this Lucy, cancer and the pain didn’t matter because she felt special. Instead, she leveraged it for personal gain of affection, satisfaction, security, superiority. The older Lucy, the controlling value, takes over when she realizes that in real life, being different is a bad thing, and to ever be happy, she needs to figure out a way to be the same.
Autobiography of a Face is a memoir. There is a seemingly insignificant difference between an autobiography and a memoir: A memoir chronicles a particular event or time in a writer’s life, but biographies usually tell a person’s story from start to finish. This book is Lucy Grealy’s memoir, discussing her experiences as a child cancer patient and young adult cancer survivor with a whole lot of health issues because of her continuous attempts at reconstructing her face. But it is also quite literally an autobiography of Lucy Grealy’s face: it begins when her face begins its change, from the initial impact of a kickball player’s shoulder to her jaw, up until she looked in a mirror, decades later, to see, whether she knew it or not, the final version of her face.
Real life, on which this book is supposed to be based, doesn’t happen with perfectly crafted Freytag’s pyramids. Life doesn’t always occur in a conventional way. That’s why it’s hard to put a memoir into a defined form, and Autobiography certainly doesn’t represent any of them entirely. However, I do think that repetitive form, or, as described by Burke, “the consistent maintaining of a principle under new guises” or “restatement of the same thing in different ways” is present in Lucy’s story (125). We know that Lucy’s face is different and disfigured. She will never look, and therefore feel, the same as everyone else. But, Lucy writes that to cope she “became pretentious” and “picked out thick books by Russian authors and carted them around with me…I read anything that sounded difficult and deep” (177). She also wrote, “Sometimes I could truly find refuge in the world of my private senses…as a way of feeling superior and thus safe from” other people (189). Lucy threw herself into her education and logic, discovering she was actually smart.
A girl who was once an extrovert became an introvert, one who was introspective and deeper than most with a unique appreciation of language. Along with her face bearing a distinction from society, this, too, her intelligence and depth, became a mark of difference for Lucy. It was a whole other reason she didn’t fit in. It makes one wonder if she would have experienced the same feelings of isolation and ineptitude if she wasn’t a cancer patient with a scarred face. Lucy’s mark of distinction crops up in a couple different ways: Her brain, like her face, mark her as outside the norm.
The minor/incidental forms pop up often in Lucy’s work. Burke in Lexicon Rhetoricae states, “When analyzing a work of any length, we may find it bristling with minor or incidental forms – such as metaphor, paradox, disclosure…their effect partially depends upon their function in the whole, yet they manifest sufficient evidences of episodic distinctness to bear consideration apart from their context” (127). I wouldn’t consider Lucy subtle about her poetic prose, her utilization of imagery, metaphor, and symbolism always matters and is interpellative. She writes, “Language itself, words and images, could be wrought and shaped into vessels for the truth and beauty I had so long hungered for” (193). If Lucy can’t have truth and beauty from her “real” life or her real face, then she can find it through her work and her words.
While it was originally central to our blog post and replies at the beginning of the semester, I do not see the hermeneutic code in the novel. I think we kind of landed there because that was the only code we were familiar with so far. Things occur that exist within the hermeneutic code, but I don’t see that arch from start to finish.
What I do see, however, is, as defined by Silverman in chapter 6 of The Subject of Semiotics, the symbolic code: “the formulation of antitheses, especially that variety which admits of no mediation between its terms. In other words, [Barthes] associates it with the articulation of binary oppositions…represented as eternal and ‘inexpiable’” (270). If we look back to the controlling value chart, Lucy’s face itself is a symbol representing her difference and otherization – it’s what marks her as different and acts as the context. Grealy writes, “It was only when I got home from the hospital that I permitted myself to look more closely at my new face. It was extremely swollen (it would be months before it went down), and a long thin scar ran the length of it…Placing my hand over the swollen and discolored parts, I tried to imagine how my face might look once it was “better”…Actually, in my mind, my face looked even better than okay, it looked beautiful. But it was a beauty that existed in the future, a possible future. As it was, I hated my face” (176). Lucy’s face is what causes her alienation, what deprives her of positive attention, and what grants her an excess of negative attention. Every few chapters, there is a new face, but when medicine and biology inevitably fails, the new face turns back into the old face, highlighting her difference from others (but her personal sameness) once again.
This symbolic code, then, feeds into the cultural code, once again defined by Silverman: he says that the cultural codes work with the “symbolic order” from the symbolic code to “function not only to organize but to naturalize that field – to make it timeless and inevitable” (274). Existing happily within a society that values aesthetics and normalcy over much else isn’t easy, if not close to impossible, for a person who doesn’t look or think or even feel the same as everyone else does. Lucy Grealy was in another realm entirely. She wrote that she “was too horrible to look at, that [she] wasn’t worthy of being looked at, that [her] ugliness was equal to a great personal failure” (185). All of her differences, repeated throughout the novel in her visible mark and her distinctive brain, separated her from the dominant culture.
I feel that this book is pretty complex in trying to determine the relationship between narrator and addressee. With all of the other books we read in our group, more often than not I was asking myself what the author wanted me to be. However, as I look back on reading this book, I realize that the better question to ask is what doesn’t Lucy Grealy want readers to be?
Unfortunately, what Grealy doesn’t want readers to be is the most common interpretation of the novel. It also happens to be my least favorite way to work through this memoir, both because I think it undermines everything this book works to do, and it doesn’t give Grealy enough writerly credit. Instead, it becomes kitschy and uplifting as opposed to what it really is. If this is the interpretation we decide to run with, Lucy could be considered as narrating 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 try. This would make her addressees better and more understanding people, or, according to Jane Gallop, more “ethical” readers who are interested in “learning to hear what’s really on the page, listening closely to the other, and being willing to catch what the other actually says, and able to hear what 
we didn’t expect him to say. If we can learn to do that with books, we might learn to do that with people” (17). I would consider this to be the “actual audience” discussed by Rabinowitz in Truth in Fiction: The actual audience “consists of the flesh-and-blood people who read the book. While this is the audience in which booksellers have the most interest, it is the only audience which is entirely ‘real,’ and the only one over which the author has no guaranteed control” (126). If we consult the afterword written by Grealy’s friend Ann Patchett, also a writer, we get more insight into what Lucy really wanted this book to convey. She writes that at a reading, she tried to make it “clear to the audience that she had no interest in being anybody’s inspiration. She was not there as a role model for overcoming obstacles. She was a serious writer, and she wanted her book to be judged for its literary merit and not its heartbreaking content” (230).
However, at the same time, I don’t think this is always completely true. Lucy was the type of person, and we were shown this again and again, who needed reassurance and attention. So maybe she said that this isn’t the response that she wanted for her memoir, but subconsciously, maybe she did. I think Lucy asks and requires of her readers to be sympathetic and empathetic. We are supposed to call on these feelings of sympathy and empathy for the author, feel bad for her when she asks us to, and feel lucky when we remember we aren’t her. 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.
Lucy spends nearly the entire book complaining about how ugly her face is, only for her to, in the last chapter or so, have readers very suddenly experience Lucy exhibit a more self-assured and accepting attitude about what she’s experienced and her face. Readers have read decades of her past where her main concern was having a normal face. She continued to get reconstructive surgeries that were not necessary for her health. Lucy was cancer free since childhood, but she continued to get plastic surgeries that would often make her sick with pneumonia and cause her great pain. She went to extreme measures in an attempt to fix her face only for the last chapter to suddenly take this turn. For me, this ending is inauthentic. 
The change of heart is random after she’s put herself through so much to get what she now seems to reject, and we know that Lucy Grealy doesn’t have a happy ending. She overdosed on heroin not too many years after her book was published. For the actual audience, the self-love and body acceptance moral is evident. But when the text is read more closely, the authorial audience perceives Lucy’s true pain and that this ending is a bit fake. Lucy’s memoir was written to be published, and a positive resolution was needed for it to be publishable.
I also notice Lucy interpellate her audience on quite a few occasions, especially by the end of the book where she’s wrapping things up: her story, her purpose, her reflection. In fact, she seems aware of her interpellation at points. Maybe we can perceive Lucy’s self at this point in her writing to be like that of a type of reader. 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” (189). I think that’s how readers of this book, or any book, really, feel sometimes. I know I did. We understand Lucy’s narrative on a plot level, the order of events, etc., but it’s hard to figure out what she needs and wants from us sometimes.
When I first stepped into this classroom, I had entirely different expectations. I figured we’d be doing similar things I do over in the English department: close-reading and analyzing texts. I figured it would be a breeze. But then the beginning weeks of the semester went by, and I had regrets. Perhaps we discussed this in class or maybe I made it up, but I thought this class was going to ruin what reading was for me. I liked my “reading for” no matter how superficial or unscholarly it was. Reading for school and reading for entertainment were entirely different experiences for me, and I wanted to keep it that way. This course challenged that, and it challenged me. It made me feel inferior and a little dumb. It felt impossible and like I would never get to that level. And maybe I never will. But all of the things we grappled with are things I want to understand. I’ve always read like a reader, but I’ve never been challenged to read like a writer.
I want to say that at some point during the semester, something clicked. Determining controlling/opposing values are difficult for me, and there’s a chance they always will be. But there was a point that I started to enjoy discovering the forms, discussing the codes, and unpacking the narrator/addressee relationship. In fact, that last section made its way to be useful in my other classes.
Rowan’s Writing Arts Department’s Core Value 3, states that students will be able to “critically read complex and sophisticated texts in a variety of subjects.” My group read varied genres: nonfiction memoir and fiction in the form of allegory, autobiographical fiction, and dystopian. Seeing the methods transpose all of the genres was interesting, especially when I thought they wouldn’t. It was probably a good thing that we started with the nonfiction.
I don’t think I would have survived this class if it wasn’t for the reading groups. Being a collaborative learning experience and having a group held me accountable and forced me to try. Not that I wouldn’t have tried without a reading group, but the structure of having a reading group leader, someone who had experienced this class before but was still learning alongside us, was helpful.
The End! Can’t wait to (hopefully) be better at this the second time around as a reading group leader!
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