Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This searing autobiography, written with intense poetic grace, stands as a matchless memorial to a writer who was scarred deeply and whose life ended before she could produce more work. Grealy had cancer as a child, endured the treatment for it, speaks of it in terms of its heartache and catharsis. But this was only the prelude to Grealy’s true ordeal, the aftermath of surgery that disfigured her face and left her to feel ugly, freakish, and separated from any possibility of intimacy. She speaks of all this with force and with brutal honesty. I have only read a score or so of memoirs; this one stands out as the finest. Our world is so oriented toward beauty that it is easy to understand the anguish she felt as a teenage girl facing a lifetime of disfigurement. The pain did not stop at her looks; due to her surgeries she was only able to eat with difficulty. She spent much of her life in search of doctors who could help her achieve something like a normal appearance. She was, by all accounts, a vibrant, fascinating human being who had a rare gift for writing. This is not a forgettable book in its unstinting bluntness about illness and its consequences.