Book Review: Autobiography of a Face
Apr. 21st, 2012 11:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI read Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face because I adored Ann Patchett’s memoir of her friendship with Grealy, Truth and Beauty, and was hoping for more of the same. Possibly these expectations damaged my experience reading Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, about the effects her childhood cancer (which led to half her jaw being surgically removed) had on her life, because I found the book disappointing.
The book feels unfinished, as if it should have gone through a couple more drafts before publication; or perhaps, as if Grealy needed more time to digest her material before she could write about it well. A good memoir isn’t just a recital of life experiences. It needs to offer a perspective on those experiences. Grealy occasionally grasps for cosmic meaning, but she seems too close to her pain and too raw to offer a more quotidian view of what this means in the context of her life. Her anguish over her deformed jaw subsumes her life: it is her life.
And I’m not sure how much that is an intrinsic flaw in the book, and how much I’m reading into it because I know from Patchett’s memoir that Grealy remained tormented by the issues she writes about in her book - her feelings of ugliness, her fear that no one would love her - until she died.
The book feels unfinished, as if it should have gone through a couple more drafts before publication; or perhaps, as if Grealy needed more time to digest her material before she could write about it well. A good memoir isn’t just a recital of life experiences. It needs to offer a perspective on those experiences. Grealy occasionally grasps for cosmic meaning, but she seems too close to her pain and too raw to offer a more quotidian view of what this means in the context of her life. Her anguish over her deformed jaw subsumes her life: it is her life.
And I’m not sure how much that is an intrinsic flaw in the book, and how much I’m reading into it because I know from Patchett’s memoir that Grealy remained tormented by the issues she writes about in her book - her feelings of ugliness, her fear that no one would love her - until she died.
