AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE - Lucy Grealy - Memoir

If you've read Ann Patchett's memoir TRUTH AND BEAUTY, you know the Lucy Grealy story. And honestly, Patchett's is a better version, as Grealy's autobiography completely elides mention of Patchett, her best friend through college, grad school, and beyond.

It's hard to say that an autobiography by a woman who died--from complications dating back to her childhood cancer--is at all bad. It's true, it's her story; it quite adequately describes the pain and psychological effects of having cancer, losing normal facial appearance, and spending years in and out of hospitals, learning and unlearning the particular variety of helplessness that accompanies drastic surgery.

But goodness, for a book that spends so long dissecting loneliness, failing to mention the existence of a friend like Patchett seems like a grave omission. Grealy's parents are inexplicably distant, to the extent that Grealy's father's death hardly affects her, and the familial anecdotes seemed pitched and perhaps concocted to make sure that all the sympathy flows downhill, to Lucy. Her siblings are mentioned in passing, where their lack of reaction to her deformity is interesting, but it is particularly jarring to look at how much time Lucy spends, as a child and an adolescent, wondering what she would have looked like without the surgery, when she has a female twin. A twin! That is almost exactly how she would have looked, and if we're to believe the narrative, she never realized this. It just seems remarkable.

Ann Patchett wrote a postscript to this memoir, recounting a shared book tour she and Grealy embarked upon, after AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE was met with resounding success. In a transcribed question and answer, Grealy bristles at being asked how she remembered so much; she is a writer, she tells the befuddled questioner, and she made it up. I wonder, though, how much is made up, especially knowing the, shall we say, personality quirks of Grealy as depicted by Patchett. How much is for sympathy, and how much for show? Grealy is said to have joked about writing a follow-up to this memoir, a sort of "Behind the Music" explaining the "real" story. If only she had written that book the first time around.