Autobiography Of A Face

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” (29-30), 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 concerns about her appearance, looking at herself only “with a preoccupied preadolescent view” (104) that observes and does not judge. This changes when she returns to school and is routinely teased for her appearance. Slowly, she grows aware of how different she looks and becomes convinced that she is “so ugly” (145) that it is inevitable that she will be bullied and reviled. She begins to long for acceptance and undergoes several operations to try and reconstruct her face, believing that this will solve all her problems. The operations are all unsuccessful.

As well as suppressing her fear and pain, symbolically highlighted by her efforts to avoid crying, Lucy also seeks to suppress and deny her desire to look beautiful and gain love and acceptance. Convinced that she will “never have a boyfriend, that no one [will] ever be interested in [her] in that way” (150), she decides instead to focus on “the real beauty that exist[s] in the world” (150), trying to replace her longing to be attractive and her pain and loneliness with an understanding of a higher, more noble form of beauty. Throughout this, she also seeks solace in a rich fantasy life and in spending much of her time with horses, which she feels are the only creatures who understand and accept her.

When Lucy attends college, she begins writing poetry (something for which she will later win several awards) and makes numerous friends who all wear “their mantels as ‘outsiders’ with pride” (196). Despite her “many rich friendships,” she remains deeply insecure and convinced that the fact that she does not have a lover means that she is “unlovable” and “too ugly” (205). When she finally finds a lover, and then a string of lovers, this, too, fails to solve her emotional pain, and she remains convinced that she is simply not “beautiful enough” (208).

When two successful operations manage to reconstruct Lucy’s face, she finds that she does not actually recognize her new face as belonging to her and avoids mirrors “for almost a year” (220). She gradually comes to terms with her new appearance and with the fact that being beautiful will not magically solve her problems, or her struggle with self-esteem. She comes to see that her own negative self-image is reflected back in the cruelty of others and begins to challenge this and move on with her new life and a new understanding of herself.