Car autobiography of a face
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Chapters Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Habits of Self-Consciousness”
Lucy begins imagining herself as beautiful but with “a beauty that exist[s] in the future, a possible future” (). However, her face remains swollen for months. She concludes that the only solution is “to stop caring” (), and becomes “pretentious,” carrying around “thick books by Russian authors” and occasionally “even read[ing] them” ().
After finding a copy of Hesse’s Siddhartha in her English class, Lucy becomes interested in Buddhism, concluding that it would be a way to be free of “desire and all its painful complications” (). She “resolve[s] that [her] face [is] actually an asset” that could teach her a lesson about life that, at sixteen years old, she decides “is all about desire and love” ().
Despite her efforts, Lucy is “abysmal at seeking enlightenment” () and is “plagued by petty desires and secret, evil hates” (). She “represse[s] every stirring” () of anger or
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Key Figures
Lucy Grealy
At age 9, Lucy is diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, a form of cancer with a 5% survival rate. She has to undergo an operation to remove half of her jaw, followed by two-and-a-half years of chemotherapy and radiation treatment. The treatment is so unpleasant that Lucy is frequently reduced to tears. However, her mother, unsure of how to support her daughter, chides her for this, insisting that she “mustn’t cry” (78) and telling her that she is disappointed in her whenever Lucy does burst into tears. From this, Lucy develops a set of self-imposed rules, including the directions that “one must never, under any circumstances, show fear and, prime directive above all, one must never, ever cry” (), learning to suppress her pain and fear in order, she believes, to gain her mother’s love.
The removal of half of her jaw gives Lucy a “pale and misshapen face” (6) and the chemotherapy causes her hair to fall out. Despite this, she does not initially have concer
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Autobiography of a Face
"I spent five years of my life being treated for cancer, but since then I've spent 15 years being treated for ingenting other than looking different from everyone else. It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly, that inom always viewed as the great tragedy of my life. The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison."
At age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially ankomsthall cancer. When she returned to school with a third of her jaw removed, she faced the cruel taunts of classmates. In this strikingly candid memoir, Grealy tells her story of great suffering and remarkable strength without sentimentality and with considerable wit. Vividly portraying the pain of peer rejection and the guilty pleasures of wanting to be special, Grealy captures with unique insight what it is like as a child and young adult to be torn between two warring impulses: to feel that more than anything else we want to be loved for who we are, while wishing desperately and