Autobiography Of A Face

“Sarah would have cried horrendously, but I was courageous and didn’t cry and thus was good. It seemed a natural enough equation at the time.”

When Lucy first undergoes medical treatment, her mother compares her favorably to her twin sister, Sarah, remarking on the fact that Lucy, unlike her sister, remained stoic in the face of fear and pain. Lucy takes this to mean that not crying equates to bravery and bravery equates to personal worth. This understanding shapes her emotional life for many years.

“One had to be good. One must never complain or struggle. One must never, under any circumstances, show fear and, prime directive above all, one must never, ever cry.”

As her mother’s admonitions to be brave and refrain from crying continue throughout her medical treatment, they begin to affect Lucy, causing her to develop a guilt-ridden code of conduct designed to win her mother’s love and approval. When she sees a little boy hiding under a hospital bed, she is shocked and embarrassed for him and acknowledges the rules of “good” behavior that she has developed.

“My mother was the Visitor Extraordinaire. She’d arrive each afternoon, give me whatever bit of news of information about my health she had as quickly and simply as possible, then sit down in a chair and begin knitting. She’d spend the entire visit knitting. Human presence is the important part of visiting, and she understood that.”

On one level, Lucy’s mother is unable to cope with her daughter’s pain and fear and so encourages her to repress her feelings as a coping mechanism, stunting her ability to process her distress. However, at the same time, she does understand some aspects of how to best support Lucy. Lucy greatly appreciates the way her mother can comfortably sit with her without the need to fuss and fret over her, or be falsely cheerful like her father.

“He got out a tourniquet and wound it tightly around my arm, pinching the skin just like a kid on the playground giving an Indian burn and despite every ounce of strength I could muster, I began to cry.”

In some respects, Dr. Woolf is only a minor character in the book. However, he has a significant impact on Lucy’s life. In her first appointment with him, his rough treatment of Lucy, along with his generally brusque and uncaring manner, trigger her first tears which, in turn, cause her mother to begin criticizing Lucy for crying, beginning a habit of repressing her emotions that continues for much of Lucy’s life.

“Her own eyes were filling with water, tears that would never fall but hovered there, only inches from my own.”

For much of her chemotherapy treatment, Lucy simply accepts her mother’s directive to never cry, uncritically adopting it as a model of “good” behavior. However, on one occasion she looks up and realizes that her mother is also fighting back tears. It is the first time that Lucy recognizes that her mother is also suffering and that her efforts to stop Lucy crying come from her own fear and sense of powerlessness.

“Every morning I had the distinct sense that I was simply opening the door on an ongoing world, constant and sure, that went on into the growing dark even if I was stuck inside, too sick to get out of bed.”

Throughout her sickness and recovery, Lucy spends a lot of time fantasizing, often imagining herself as an alien, or a rider for the Pony Express. This allows her, for a time, to escape the harsh realities of her life. She also loves to believe that her toy animals are actually alive, even when she is not around to play with them. This not only serves as a source of escapist relief but also reminds her that there is life beyond her illness, life that continues without her but will be there when she is well enough to engage with it again.

“I looked at myself in the mirror with a preoccupied preadolescent view, which is to say that I looked at myself but didn’t judge myself.”

When Lucy looks at her reflection shortly after her operation, she does not see a problem with her missing jaw and balding head. She sees them but does not recognize them as “ugly” or consider herself to be “ugly.” This is one of the last moments when she is free of such concerns and sorrows, as the cruelty of others will soon convince her that she is so ugly that she deserves to be mocked and will never find love.

“More than the ugliness I felt, I was suddenly appalled at the notion that I’d been walking around unaware of something that was apparent to everyone else. A profound sense of shame consumed me.”

Once the cruelty of others has begun to make Lucy aware of how different she looks, she decides to take a long, critical look at herself in the mirror. For the first time, she is shocked and horrified by what she now perceives as ugliness. She is even more horrified that she never realized how other people saw her and so not only loses the freedom of not judging herself but actually feels ashamed for not having done so earlier.

“I felt such freedom: I waltzed up to people effortlessly and boldly, I asked questions and made comments the rest of my troupe were afraid to make. I didn’t understand their fear.”

Without her consciously realizing it, Lucy has become shy, anxious, and withdrawn as a result of the insults and stares she receives on a daily basis. When she puts on a Halloween costume for the first time since her operation, the anonymity it grants her causes a radical transformation, suddenly freeing her from the fears and self-awareness that have dictated her behavior for so long.

“Assuming this was how other people felt all the time, I again named my own face as the thing that kept me apart, as the tangible element of what was wrong with my life and with me.”

Although putting on a Halloween mask is, in many respects, a liberating experience for Lucy, it is something of a bittersweet freedom. She is painfully reminded of how much her behavior has changed and how restricted she is in her normal life. More than this, she uses this revelation to reinforce the idea that her face is central to all of her difficulties, feeding her guilty desire to “fix” her face in order to get on with her life.

“Besides, I reasoned, what could I do about it? I was ugly, so people were going to make fun of me: I thought it was their right to do so simply because I was so ugly, so I’d just better get used to it.”

Lucy’s mother’s criticism of her crying encourages Lucy to believe that she is not entitled to feel pain, fear, and sorrow. Combined with the relentless bullying of others, this gives Lucy incredibly low self-esteem, making her feel that she deserves the traumatic experiences she suffers. She concludes, ultimately, that other people are more entitled to insult her than she is to live a life free of bullying and taunts.

“I understood my mother’s offer only as barbed verification of what I believed to be the indisputable truth: I was too ugly to go to school.”

Having spent years desperately trying to avoid going to school because of the bullying she experiences there, Lucy’s mother finally relents and gives her the option of not attending after a botched dental operation results in her front teeth being smashed into “ugly” stumps. Lucy takes this as a confirmation that her “ugliness” is responsible for keeping her apart from others, reinforcing her view that her face is the root cause of all of her trauma and troubles.

“Because I was never going to have love (this realization, too painful to linger over, I embraced swiftly and finally), I cast myself in the role of Hero of Love […] I would become a hero through my understanding of the real beauty that existed in the world.”

Lucy grows increasingly convinced that her appearance makes her unlovable and, especially, undesirable. Continuing the habit of repressing her emotions that she learned from her mother, she does not allow herself to express the pain and sorrow this causes her. Instead, she attempts to repress it and even deny that it exists by pretending that she is interested only in a “higher” form of beauty and is not concerned with her own physical attractiveness.

“We were speaking two different languages; if this looked good, then what I thought would look good must be an impossible dream. I felt stupid for having had any expectations or hopes at all.”

It is not only the bullying of others that convinces Lucy that she is truly ugly; the forced optimism and false positivity of others also causes her to believe that she will never be beautiful. As she recognizes this, she again berates herself for her guilty dreams of looking conventionally beautiful and attempts to suppress her desires and hopes once more.

“There was only one solution, and that was to stop caring. I became pretentious. I picked out thick books by Russian authors and carted them around with me. Sometimes I even read them.”

Lucy continues to try and convince herself and others that she is not concerned about her own physical beauty. In an extension of the fantasies she had as a child, she creates an image of herself as a scholarly figure, too preoccupied by deep thoughts and highart to be affected by such petty things as her appearance.

“Desire and all its painful complications, I decided, was something I should and would be free of.”

When Lucy discovers a Buddhist text in her English classroom, she quickly embraces the philosophy. For Lucy, Buddhism offers not only the comfort and escapism she had previously experienced with the Christian literature she was sent as a child but also a way to keep suppressing her emotions. In a somewhat shallow understanding of the belief system, she sees it as another way to repress her longing to look normal and beautiful and focus on “higher” matters.

“I was never going to have anyone want me in that way, so I mustn’t desire such a thing; in this way I could be grateful to my face for ‘helping’ me to see the error of earthly desire. This complicated gratitude lasted for about five minutes before giving way to depression, plain and simple.”

There are two components that are central to Lucy’s repression of her desires. She genuinely believes that she will never form a romantic or sexual relationship, so there is no point to her desiring such a thing. She also feels that she is not entitled to feel pain or sorrow or longing over this. She attempts to convince herself that she is lucky because this removes the possibility of love from her life, freeing her to consider loftier matters. However, she is never actually successful in persuading herself or repressing her desires.

“I went with the I-don’t-care-I’m-an-artist look, which required that everything I wore come from the Bargain Box, the local thrift store, and cost no more than a dollar-fifty. Extra points went to anything I found lying on the street.”

As she had done at school with her “pretentious” academic image, when Lucy goes to college, she quickly adopts an image that is designed to look like she does not care about her appearance. By her own admission, this is an attempt to show the world that she is already aware that she is “ugly,” and that this supposed ugliness does not concern her at all.

“They wore their mantles as ‘outsiders’ with pride, whether because of their politics, their sexuality, or anything else that makes a person feel outside of the norm. Their self-definition was the very thing that put me at ease with them. I didn’t feel judged. I felt acceptance I had never experienced before.”

College is the first time that Lucy ever feels truly accepted by other people. There, she finds numerous other people who feel excluded from normal society and embrace this as a positive thing. In this context, she is just another outcast cheerfully embracing their place on the margins, which allows her to feel that she belongs for the first time in her life.

“Even though I now possessed many rich friends, […] if so many people thought I was such a lovable person, the fact that I still wasn’t able to get a lover proved I was too ugly.”

Despite finally feeling accepted by others, Lucy’s new friendships do nothing to change her belief that she will never form a romantic relationship with someone else, or alleviate the sorrow this absence causes. In fact, in some respects, it worsens the situation, convincing her that, if her personality is acceptable enough to win her numerous friends, then it must be her physical “ugliness” that stops her finding a lover.

“Not surprisingly, I saw sex as my salvation. If only I could get someone to have sex with me, it would mean that I was attractive, that someone could love me.”

Unable to acknowledge that she needs to accept and love herself, Lucy constantly craves confirmation of her worth from others. Even after making many friends, she remains certain that only finding a lover will make her feel that she is beautiful or deserving of love and solve all of her self-esteem problems.

“It was just as much a costume as dressing androgynously had been, and even though these new dresses hid none of my curves, I believed they hid my fear of being ugly. I thought I could use my body to distract people from my face.”

At Jude’s suggestion, Lucy begins dressing in a more stereotypically feminine, “sexy” manner. She soon becomes fixated on this but recognizes that, just like the Halloween masks that covered her face, she uses this as a way to disguise the face that she remains convinced is so ugly that she cannot be loved.

“There I was in my short skirts and sharp mind and list of lovers, trying so hard to convince myself that maybe all I really needed to do was learn how to treat myself better. I was on the verge of learning this, yet I was still so suspicious, so certain that only another’s love could prove my worth absolutely.”

As she grows older, Lucy finally begins to recognize that no amount of friends, lovers, “sexy” outfits, academic achievements, or anything else will ever truly convince her that she has worth. Instead, this must come from a difficult process of self-acceptance, one that is internal, rather than external. Despite this, she still struggles to actually allow herself to feel worthy.