Summary and Reviews of Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy

Media Reviews

New York Times Book Review Despite its unblinking stare at an excruciatingly painful subject, this is not a dour book. Autobiography of a Face is a book about image, about the tyranny of the image of a beautiful - or even pleasingly average - face. In the end, this tyranny is not so much overthrown as shrugged off.

Washington Post Book World Grealy has turned her misfortune into a book that is engaging and engrossing, a story of grace as well as cruelty.

Booklist - Donna Seaman It's no surprise Grealy is a tremendously powerful writer: she saved her own life by telling herself stories to live by. Now she'll change our lives by sharing them.

Kirkus Reviews A gracefully written account of one woman's physical and spiritual struggle to surmount childhood cancer, permanent disfigurement, and, ultimately, 'the deep bottomless grief...called ugliness.' An unsentimental, honest, unflinching look at a single visage reflected (or distorted) in an unforgiving cultural mirror. A strong debut.

Library Journal - Wilder Williams Grealy writes with a poet's lyric grace, but her account of her endless quest for beauty at times becomes repetitious; the most moving part of her memoir comes in her depiction of chemotherapy's agonies and the unintentional cruelty of parents telling their suffering child not to cry. For all collections.

Publishers Weekly Her discovery that true beauty lies within makes this a wise and healing book.