An exquisitely written page-turner with gut-wrenching emotional honesty. Though most of us do not get childhood cancer or have permanently disfigured faces, we can all relate to the need to fit in, to seek identity and belonging. This book is not for the squeamish, but it sure made my own problems seem trivial.

Highly recommended! ( )

So much pain.

This is a childhood cancer memoir, though the wonderful afterword by Ann Patchett does not want you to think of it as a cancer memoir, but as a beautiful piece of writing. OK, but it's about a girl who went to chemo every single week for two years.

And SPOILER alert. I found myself thinking, "I can't believe they killed her father and both her horses!!!" I don't know why my mind phrased it that way, "they", as if it were a movie, rather than a true story. But yeah. It's not bad enough she has bone cancer and disfigurement.

I was planning to go on to Ann Patchett's TRUTH AND BEAUTY next, which is about the adult friendship between Patchett and Grealy, but I just felt like I'd had enough. So much pain.

This was a difficult book to read, but one which I found beautifully written despite the emotional and physical pain suffered by the author throughout her entire story. As a child of nine, she was diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma, which is a cancer that was treated with radical facial surgery. In order to prevent a recurrence of the life-threatening cancer, she had to undergo two and a half years of chemotherapy. Following that, she endured years and years of mostly disappointing plastic surgery on her jawline. She never felt that her face was sufficiently acceptable in the view of others although she was able to make friends after high school, attend college and direct her career toward writing.

This book made me want to be her friend. She always seemed so lonely and misunderstood because of her appearance. Her greatest solace during her younger years was with her companionship and work with horses. Both of the horses that she once owned met untimely ends. It all seemed so unfair.

In this book, the author mentioned a lot about flap procedures for plastic surgery. As a surgical oncology nurse back in the 1960s and 1970s, I remember patients with those flap procedures. They were horrible. Fortunately the author never had any of those that were proposed to her, but the surgical procedures which she did have (there were so many!) had terrribly disappointing results. It all seems unfair to me that a child had to suffer such a fate and continue to endure hardships as what this author faced year after year. She was a very brave person for telling her own story with such eloquence. ( )

Good moving story of a disfigured girl and how she coped with it. ( )

Lucy Grealy‘s Autobiography of a Face is on most short lists of best memoirs. Grealy became modestly famous from her story at the time it was published.

While I can’t say I didn’t enjoy reading it or sympathize with the girl who suffered so much, it didn’t affect me–reach me or touch me–the way it seems to affect most readers. I slightly pulled back from Grealy at times as I read the book. That’s kind of horrifying for me to think about because what happens to the young Grealy in the story is tragic: Grealy had cancer as a child and lost part of her jaw to the disease, growing up with a disfigured face.

As I try to look through the book to give you an idea of why I felt lukewarm, I can’t find any clues–although it seems to me that the world through her eyes didn’t seem like a world I know or a way that I connect with the world. Skimming the book, I realize I need to read it again. Maybe it was me. I want to be fair. I want to be accurate. I’ll toss it on the pile of unread books!

(When I subsequently read Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty I began to realize why I didn't "properly" respond to Grealy's book!) ( )