Autobiography of a Face Annotated Bibliography

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.

Value Chart

 

 

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!

 

Log of Blogs:

Autobiography of a Face Blog 1

Animal Farm 4

The Bell Jar 3

The Trial Blog 2

The Trial Blog 2

Me after I try to read this book.

Reading Kafka’s The Trial has been challenging and insane. It is a story about a man, K., who is under arrest and on trial for…something. I wish I could describe the book as something other than weird, but it just keeps getting weirder. Personally, I have been finding it difficult to find a way into the text. I can’t even tell if I’m experiencing the text mimetically, let alone thematically. Lots of crazy stuff happens that makes the book inaccessible in a way, not necessarily in the language, but within the plot.

Attributing a genre, or even meaning, to this text seems wrong in some way, but I can, fairly certainly, say that this is a symptom of my own resistance. I didn’t exist in 19th century Germany, but I feel confident in saying that this text isn’t realism. I almost want to call this dystopian: It features the main character trapped in a crazy, failing world where only he or she has enough sense to see what is wrong. Everyone seems to be on a different, namely worse, wavelength than K. I’d maybe even call it fantasy because I’m so far removed from this nonsense. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the book, and these are the genres I’ve settled on. However, I’m expecting an overarching, philosophical meaning will emerge by the end of the last third.

Dystopian literature exists for a laundry list of reasons, but I’ll mention just one in the context of The Trial. People live in fear. People are paranoid. People are pessimists. Sometimes, people think things are just going way too well for them. It’s only a matter of time (or is it already happening????) before it becomes a norm for innocent people to get indicted or for America’s first annual Hunger Games to air on our TV screens. Since we have to wait patiently for these things to happen, we must write about what we foresee instead. We experienced another “reason” for dystopian literature in our second book, Animal Farm: satire and social commentary.

I would argue that Syllogistic Progressive form is best for The Trial. This form is based on the “unfolding steps of an argument.” This argumentative style is how things work in a court of law, which is sort of what K’s story is about, albeit some strange kind of court of law.

This is basically what they have on K.

It is hard to give specific textual quotes of the employment of this form throughout the text, because, in one way or another, the syllogistic progressive form is being used throughout its entirety. I swear that isn’t me being lazy. But, we arrive at the text on the day that K. was arrested “without having done anything wrong” (Kafka 7). K. feels wronged. We experience K.’s interactions with various law enforcement personnel, like warders, magistrates, law-court attendants, deputies, the list goes on. Each one represents a different level in his case as it unfolds. Nearing the end of the second third of the book, the readers and K. meet a courtroom painter, who goes on to explain insider court information. He says, “The great privilege, then, of absolving from guilt our Judges do not possess, but they do have the right to take the burden of the charge off your shoulders. That is to say, when you are acquitted in this fashion the charge is lifted from your shoulders for the time being, ” (Kafka 147). What the court painter is saying is that the judge has control over the conclusion, but not much control over the premises. K. doesn’t have control over either, yet he is very fixated on the conclusion of the argument (his inevitable acquittal because he is innocent) than any of the previous steps of the arguments. This is also true for many of the law enforcement officers he’s come into contact with, as well. I found it useful to read “On Rhetoric” by Arthur Schopenhauer, where he wrote, “Let the premisses come first, and the conclusion follow. This rule, however, is seldom observed, and people go to work the reverse way, since zeal, hastiness, and dogmatic positiveness urge us to shout out the conclusion loudly and noisily at the person who adheres to the opposite error.” If K. wants to have a happy ending to his story, he needs to quit focusing on the hopeful conclusion of his story and focus on the premises that got him there. It’s like treating the symptoms of something instead of trying to fix the cause. It is counterproductive. If K. keeps going on this way, I imagine that this story will not have a very happy ending for him.

Also me while reading.

The Bell Jar 3

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath profiles Esther Greenwood’s sinking into an anxious and depressed state as she tries to make her way in the world as a young woman in the early 20th century. As we’ve seen through the first three-quarters of the book, we’ve discovered how dense and complex Esther’s story and Plath’s writing really is, so it was helpful for me, personally, to delve into intertextual codes in an attempt to explore the text on more thorough levels.

The hermeneutic code, as Silverman explains as a code that “inscribes the desire for closure and truth,” seemed like the best to tackle first for The Bell Jar (Silverman 257). Figuring out how we can apply the hermeneutic code to Plath’s novel will hopefully open up doors for other intertextual codes.

The hermeneutic code is all about breaking down a mystery into “morphemes,” which, in turn, creates a “hermeneutic sentence” (257). The Bell Jar in its entirety is a mystery, but I wanted to try to apply the hermeneutic code to Esther’s being depressed specifically. This choice is probably still a bit too generic, but there is still a lot of other stuff going on in the novel, particularly in the beginning.

I decided on this topic because many people treat Esther as if she has no reason to be depressed or as if it is a conscious choice she is making to act and feel the way she does. Backtracking a little bit, the thematization would be that Esther is kind of an odd and different girl (and everyone treats her as such). According to Silverman, the thematization “involves a quite complex operation, in which the semic code plays an important role” (258). We know that the semic code involves the repetition of things, semes, around a proper noun. Maybe it’s a bit of a stretch, but could we argue that Plath does a lot of work to prove and repeat Esther’s differences? We see it in her struggle to fit in at her job, relate to her peers, and more.

This thematization opens up the proposal of the enigma: Esther is depressed and anxious, but why? To be honest, the thematization and proposal of the enigma, at least in this story, seem to overlap a bit. The formulation of the enigma appears when we learn about some of Esther’s symptoms, like how she “hadn’t slept for fourteen nights and how [she] couldn’t read or write or swallow very well” (Plath 135). Esther is suffering through some pretty serious symptoms, yet she is still being belittled and ignored by her own doctor and mother.

Doctor Gordon prescribes Esther shock therapy as the treatment for her issue (or, a request for an answer), and “with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant. I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done” (143). This scene is pretty devastating – Esther is now blaming herself for something she can’t control, and she is suffering extreme pain. It’s no surprise that this shock therapy didn’t work, failing to solve the enigma, which is called jamming in the hermeneutic morpheme. We see a snare before her shock treatment when Esther considers running, and we see a snare after the treatment when we witness Esther’s suicidal thoughts and practice for her future suicide attempt. Silverman says, “The snare represents the most intricate of the hermeneutic morphemes, and the one richest in possible variations” (Silverman 260). Esther tries to literally evade the possible answer to her problem by running away from her treatment appointment. Afterward, she considers trying to evade her enigma literally by ending her life altogether.

At this point in the novel, we haven’t quite come across the suspended or partial answers or the disclosure of the enigma. We still have another quarter of the book to go, and I have a feeling Plath will keep us on our toes until the very last page.

 

Esther needs a friend like Ferris.

 

Animal Farm 4

By Blog 4, we know that Animal Farm is a story about an animal rebellion, organized in hopes of creating a humanless utopia. In this utopia, Animal Farm, animals would be completely self-sustaining and have freedom. It’s unsurprising that this does not work out. Animal Farm, when read as a writerly reader and considering the various narration and addressee roles, offers many different layers.

Definitely not this kind of pig story.

What struck me as soon as I began reading the book, and as I mentioned in my response to Blog 3, is that Orwell calls Animal Farm a “fairy story.” Most people read this story in school at a somewhat younger age, around middle school. It makes sense, then, that this story is called a “fairy story” because it implies that this story is for a younger audience. I imagine this is an audience that is, for the most part, ignorant of the political and historical satire the story offers. As older, more educated individuals reading this story, the allegorical/satirical nature of the story is evident to us. But it’s interesting that Orwell calls it a fairy story, which opens it up to an entirely new audience, or set of addressees. Already we have two different readerly roles. As informed readers understanding Orwell’s references to and satirizing of Soviet Russia and Communism, they become part of the authorial audience as referred to by Peter Rabinowitz in Truth in Fiction.

Based on our group discussions, I’ve come up with somewhat of an analogy: Orwell is to us as the pigs are to the rest of animal farm. Orwell is, in a way, manipulative and shaping readers to be what he wants and needs for a successful, impactful story. However, this can mean many different shapes. Orwell interpellates us in one distinct way. There is a character named Napoleon. This pig’s name is a very obvious allusion to anyone who is educated in history at all. This allusion, I think, portrays Rabinowitz’s narrative audience: Most people are familiar with the name Napoleon. Whether it is conscious or subconscious, many people understand what the name implies, even without extensive knowledge of the real Napoleon’s reign. Both the real Napoleon and the pig Napoleon are guilty of tyrannical, authoritarian leadership, mass murder, The difference, however, is that Orwell’s Napoleon seems to succeed.

Me to the Napoleons.

As a group, we discussed that each character seems to represent a different kind of reader. For example, Mollie, a very vapid horse, could be analogized to a passive kind of reader who is stuck within the mimetic register. When things start getting crazy in the story and on the farm, Mollie just leaves and “none of the animals ever mentioned Mollie again” (Orwell 47). She just wasn’t on their level. Benjamin, a donkey, plays the role of a resistant reader, as he “seldom talked, and when he did, it was usually to make some cynical remark” (5). I could consider Boxer, the most loyal and hardest working horse, to be a very submissive reader, as “his two favorite maxims, ‘I will work harder’ and ‘Comrade Napoleon is always right’” (125-6).

Benjamin as a reader, probably.

He immediately accepted anything the pigs fed him. A part of Orwell’s plan I didn’t fully realize I was submitting to throughout the story was that I was, without question, accepting the fact that the animals learned to read, write, organize a military, talk, etc. These are all things that animals just do not do. This entire story would have been for naught if Orwell wasn’t able to convince me that animals are capable of doing something more than eating and existing.

The pigs as characters are also very manipulative – to both the animals and the readers. As a reader, I sometimes caught myself believing them! At one point, Snowball, the pig, becomes everyone’s scapegoat. If the windmill fell, it was Snowball’s doing. If something was missing or someone was slacking in their work, it was because of Snowball. If the pig leaders needed to divert the attentions of others from themselves, they blamed Snowball and made him the enemy. In referencing Rabinowitz again, I consider my falling into believing Napoleon and Squealer when they were blaming Snowball as my joining the ideal narrative audience. It’s interesting that the narrator of this story resides in the third person objective point of view. The narrator only relays the story, giving us no thoughts or feelings onto which we can project. I think this third person voice encourages the audience to trust what the narrator is saying, falling into the same traps the comrades of Animal Farm do. I also wonder if this doubles as a time where I’m a submissive reader: is it part of Orwell’s plan to have me fall into this trap? Maybe if I accept the role that the animals on the farm do, then I would be more likely to perceive his social commentary.

Therefore, the submissive and authentic reader for Orwell is one who accepts his tale of human-like animals, one who is knowledgeable about communism and Russian history, and one who understands the allusions to Napoleon. I think taking on this role can be quite difficult. This interpretation of Animal Farm is so widely accepted. New readers maybe trapped in going into the story only halfway there. Instead of taking on a readerly role that understands and accepts all the nuances of Orwell’s strategic work, they may just assume it’s there and not work to discover it.

“I will twerk harder.”

 

Autobiography of a Face Blog 1

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.

 

Autobiography of a Face cover

 

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.

 

An attempt at a value graph

 

When your jaw is wired shut, you get an ice cream diet. Silver lining????

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.

“Couldn’t she understand that sleeping was the single most desirable act in the world, the only thing I could ever want to do with the rest of my life?” – Lucy on page 24, but also me every day

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.