42 pages • 1 hour read
Lucy GrealyAutobiography Of A Face
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1994A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Cruelty of Others
After her operation, and after her hair starts to fall out, Lucy begins to experience bullying and taunting “both from strangers and from the very boys whom [she had] once regarded as friends” (106). She experiences direct insults about her being “the ugliest girl […]ever seen” (124), as well as stares and whispers from children and adults alike. She endeavors to ignore this, recognizing that “their comments [are] meant to impress each other more than harm [her]” (105). However, the insults start to affect her dramatically. Most significantly, they profoundly shape Lucy’s perception of herself. Immediately following the operation, Lucy only looks at herself “with a preoccupied preadolescent view” (104) without judgment and criticism of her appearance. For a while she remains “blissfully unaware” (6) of how her appearance marks her as different. Eventually, however, she learns “the language of paranoia” (6) and becomes convinced that she is “so ugly” (145) that she deserves to be mocked and is entirely unlovable. This view of herself results in her “changing, becoming more fearful” (145) and leads to her spending much of her life depressed and desperate to feel wanted and attractive.
Acceptance
Given the great cruelty Lucy experiences, it is perhaps not surprising that she is plagued by “feelings of being an outsider” (8) and longs to be accepted by others. Initially, the only real acceptance she feels comes from animals. She enjoys time with her cats, dogs, and horses because they do not judge her appearance, and comes to believe that they are “the only beings capable of understanding [her]” (5). With the exception of children that she sometimes meets in hospital, it is not until she goes to college that she truly feels acceptance from other humans. Here, she meets people who wear “their mantels as ‘outsiders’ with pride” (196) and comes to befriend them. She is shocked to find them “extraordinarily nice and even interested in” her and is delighted to be “having intense discussions about life, art, all the topics [she has] been craving for so long” (192). Despite these “many rich friendships,” however, Lucy remains convinced that “not having a lover” means that she is “unlovable” (205) and still longs for the sense of acceptance she believes will come from a romantic relationship. When she finally finds a lover, and then several lovers, she still finds herself unsatisfied and longing for acceptance. It is not until the closing chapter of the book, when she confronts her perception of herself, that she begins to realize that the acceptance she needs most is self-acceptance.
Beauty
Lucy has a complex relationship with beauty. Convinced that her problems stem from her perceived ugliness, she is fixated on attaining physical beauty, imagining herself to have “a beauty that exist[s] in the future, a possible future” (176) and always hoping that the next operation “might finally fix my face, fix my life” (215). When some of her operations are successful, and she attains the physical beauty she has always wanted, she is surprised that it does not solve all of her problems, asking, “Where was all that relief and freedom that I thought came with beauty?” (204). At the same time that she desperately longs to be beautiful, Lucy works to deny these desires, insisting that she “mustn’t desire such a thing” (181) and focusing instead on a higher form of beauty or “the real beauty that exist[s] in the world” (150). She searches for nobility and beauty in literature and art and even embraces Buddhism as a way to be free of “desire and all its painful complications” (178) by focusing on higher matters. It takes most of the book before she starts to reconcile these warring perceptions of beauty and “begins to own [her] desires” (205) to be beautiful while acknowledging that physical beauty is not a magic bullet that will solve all of her problems.
The Suppression of Emotions
Lucy’s mother requires handling “in a delicate and prescribed way, though the exact rules of protocol [seem] to shift frequently and without advance notice” (9). One of the ways Lucy achieves this is by attempting to suppress her own pain and fear about her illness and the medical procedures she has to undergo. When she fails to do so, her mother tells her that “there [is] no need to cry, that everything [will] be alright, that [Lucy] mustn’t cry,” and later explains “how disappointed she was that [Lucy had] cried” (78). From this, Lucy learns how to behave around her mother, fixating on a time when she “was courageous and didn’t cry and thus was good” (21). Eventually, this builds into an understanding that she is not entitled to feel pain and sorrow, causing her to be swamped by “feelings of shame and guilt for failing to not suffer” (90). As Lucy becomes more aware of how her appearance marks her as different and begins to long to be beautiful and attractive, so that she can find a romantic partner, she soon starts repressing these feelings and desires, too, telling herself that she “mustn’t desire such a thing” (181). She decides that the only way to cope is “to stop caring” (177) and, at college, adopts an “I-don’t-care-I’m-an-artist look” in “an attempt not to care, to show the world […] [she] already [she] knew [she] was ugly” (194). Despite these attempts to suppress her feelings, she remains “plagued by petty desires and secret, evil hates” (181). It takes many years before she “begins to own [her] desires” (205) and accept that she is entitled to feel fear, pain, sorrow, and a longing to be attractive and accepted.
