Lucy Grealy Understood What It Meant To Be Seen

Lucy Grealy was an unsparing observer of human physiognomy. She was a poet, with the requisite eye for piercing detail, but her attention to personal appearance—and its effect on the observer—had a particularly bracing lack of euphemism. Here is her description of the person she calls “Dr. Woolf,” the pediatric oncologist who had administered chemotherapy to her: “Tall, large-featured, and balding, he had a peculiar large white spot on his forehead, which caught the light in an unflattering, sinister way. His nose was tremendous, his lips invisible. He scared me.”

Dr. Woolf appears in “Autobiography of a Face,” Grealy’s memoir, which recounts her arrival in his office after her diagnosis, at age nine, with Ewing’s sarcoma, a bone cancer that had caused a tumor in the right side of her jaw. Grealy describes her illness and its treatment (surgery, radiation, chemotherapy) with staunch fidelity to her child’s-eye view—which means that being sick seems at first like a chance to get out of school, that hospital stays hold out the promise of adventure, and that she has no idea what chemotherapy entails. The realization of the last arrives, with an overpowering force, only once Dr. Woolf has the needle in her arm. “I had never known it was possible to feel your organs, feel them the way you feel your tongue in your mouth, or your teeth,” Grealy writes. “My stomach outlined itself for me.” She vomits convulsively, and continues vomiting for much of the following week, in a cycle that would be repeated almost every week for two and a half years. Adults explain little to her—the possibility of death lies beyond her field of vision—which gives the vivid misery of her treatment a fairy-tale quality. (Big bad Dr. Woolf!) Its particulars are monstrous, its logic mysteriously irresistible, its results a transformation. Only once chemotherapy ends and her hair grows back does she realize that strangers haven’t been staring at her because she’s bald: they have been staring because of her face.

To Grealy, at the time, the surgery that removed her sarcoma had seemed insignificant compared with those weekly sessions with Dr. Woolf. But, as she leaves the cloistered world of cancer treatment, she learns that her looks—and her life—have been altered irrevocably. “Half my jaw was missing, which gave my face a strange triangular shape, accentuated by the fact that I was unable to keep my mouth completely closed,” Grealy writes. Quickly, her face comes to stand in her mind for all possible deficiencies or unhappiness. Even away from the torments of high school, where taunting boys prowl the hallways and cafeteria, “I was my face, I was ugliness. . . . Everything led to it, everything receded from it—my face as personal vanishing point.” In the first part of her story, she sees her body as an adversary to be mastered. Pain is an opportunity to win adult approval by showing that she can be “brave.” In the second, she finds that she can’t hold her physical form at the same remove: she is her body, and that body seems to preclude the world’s approval.

“Autobiography,” a sensation when it was published, in 1994, has been reissued this week in honor of its thirtieth anniversary. The book started out as an essay called “Mirrorings”; Grealy had written it for a grad-school friend’s anthology of women writers titled “Minding the Body,” after which it appeared in Harper’s, winning a National Magazine Award and earning her a book deal. The resulting memoir was a frank account of her childhood pain and a meditation on identity. “I was honing my self-consciousness into a torture device, sharp and efficient enough to last me the rest of my life,” she writes of facing the world’s gaze as an adolescent. Even her description of chemotherapy—her stomach outlined, her internal organs individually asserting themselves—suggests that what her ordeal gave her was a kind of unbearable self-awareness. Grealy, uninterested in therapeutic platitudes, offered unflinching precision: on the page, she controlled what the reader saw. Her acuity gives equal weight and immediacy to both the intangible reality of human relationships (the social hierarchies among children in a cancer ward, say) and the brute force of physical experience.

When the memoir came out, Grealy was vaulted from a life of fellowship applications and adjunct teaching to one of TV interviews and magazine spreads. Long after the threat of cancer had passed, she remained a denizen of hospitals, undergoing more than thirty reconstructive surgeries in the course of her life. For the most part, these failed: grafts of bone and soft tissue swelled, scarred, reabsorbed, and disappeared, leaving behind the question of how to live in a body that both defined her and refused stable definition. She died in 2002, at age thirty-nine, of a heroin overdose.

In the years since Grealy’s death, the book has become a fixture of college syllabi and also of the sort of recommended-reading lists that promise upper-middlebrow self-help. (Suleika Jaouad, who contributed a foreword to the new edition, has called “Autobiography” her “sick girl bible”; she is the author of a memoir and a TED talk on surviving cancer.) From the beginning, and notwithstanding Grealy’s unsentimental intellect, “Autobiography” was greeted in certain quarters as an inspiring reminder that beauty is only skin-deep. “How many women have never imagined that being beautiful would transform their lives and solve all their problems?” read a review that ran in the South Bend Tribune, under the headline “Our Obsession With Looks: It’s Cruel, Wasteful.” NPR’s “Morning Edition” host asked Grealy about fashion magazines; Newsday characterized the book’s story as an author “learning to accept her appearance in a culture that places a premium on beauty.” (Is there—has there ever been—a culture that does not place “a premium on beauty”?) In “Minding the Body,” Grealy’s essay had been anthologized alongside work by Naomi Wolf, who was then in the heyday of “The Beauty Myth,” her 1990 best-seller on the media’s unrealistic standards and women’s body image. Early press for “Autobiography” sometimes treated it as if Grealy were picking up where Wolf left off.

Yet Grealy’s book gives no warm reassurance that it’s what’s inside that really counts. For better or worse, what’s outside matters very much: the membrane of appearance that holds a person in the world is powerful stuff. (It would perhaps surprise some of these early readers to learn that in her twenties Grealy had got—had indeed delighted in getting—breast implants.) Some people, she told Charlie Rose in a 1994 interview, seemed to want her to say that beauty was unimportant. “That’s entirely not true,” she said. “It’s very important and utterly irrelevant at the same time.” With “Autobiography,” she had hoped to capture this paradoxical reality: “I think it’s really a book about being looked at and being seen.”

The prospect of being seen holds an ambivalent allure, as “Autobiography of a Face” makes clear. Grealy narrates competing desires to stand out and to fit in—hallmarks of any adolescence—under circumstances that render them extreme. She had learned early on what it meant to live constantly under others’ eyes. She hid behind hats and curtains of hair as a child and a teen-ager, but she was always, finally, visible. Over time, she found ways to wield that visibility—not with anything as straightforward as pride but with a kind of defiant bravado. Ann Patchett, who first encountered Grealy as a fellow-undergrad at Sarah Lawrence, became close with her when they were both getting M.F.A.s (Patchett in fiction, Grealy in poetry) at the University of Iowa. In “Truth and Beauty,” a memoir by Patchett, from 2004, about their friendship, she describes the figure that Grealy cut in college, where she established herself as a campus celebrity. “Even at Sarah Lawrence, a school full of models and actresses and millionaire daughters of industry, everyone knew Lucy,” Patchett writes. “We knew things about Lucy the way one knows things about the private lives of movie stars.” Grealy, who had a “reputation for being the smartest student in all of her classes,” ran a campus film series on weekends. When she’d take the stage before a screening, “the crowd of students cheered her so wildly, screaming and applauding and chanting her name,” Patchett recalls. “She would wrap her arms around her head and twist from side to side, mortified, loving it.”

In “Autobiography,” Grealy writes wryly of the “artistic persona” afforded by her growing love of poetry: she’d pull classmates aside and (“without any sense of irony”) announce, “You have to hear this, it will change your life,” before reciting Rilke or Ashbery. “One’s looks were still of paramount importance,” she notes. “Only the aesthetic had changed. . . . I went with the I-don’t-care-I’m-an-artist look, which required that everything I wore came from The Bargain Box, the local thrift store, and cost no more than a dollar fifty.” Later, in her twenties, she took to miniskirts and heels—“I even got dressed up to go to the supermarket,” she writes. A hypersexual posture became a way of seeking validation while daring onlookers to judge her. Patchett recalls being scandalized when Grealy, in her thirties, gave a reading of an essay that described bringing home a stranger and masturbating in front of him.

Grealy relished the public profile that came with her book’s success. “This was exactly what I wanted all along,” she told an interviewer for the Guardian, when it was published in the U.K. “I got recognised this morning in a shop, and I genuinely enjoyed it.” Patchett writes that her friend revelled in the swirl of publicity: touring for a year on behalf of her book’s hardcover and again for the paperback, posing nude in a tree for a photoshoot, being greeted by supermodels on the streets outside her SoHo loft—“she loved all of it.” But (as Patchett also writes) the rush of public adoration did not stop Grealy from insisting to friends that she was ugly, unloved, and, ample romantic partners notwithstanding, certain to wind up alone. The fact of her face remained a “personal vanishing point.” The endless succession of reconstructive surgeries held out the promise of a new face, and, with it, a new life; what they delivered more reliably was pain, arduous recoveries, and further medication. “I looked forward to the pleasant, sleepy feeling they offered,” Grealy writes, of a teen-age prescription for codeine pills. “No matter how bad I felt about the world, about my position in it, I felt safe and secure and even rather happy thirty or forty minutes after I’d downed a couple pills.” The drugs that came with surgery set her on course for a heroin addiction, which finally killed her.

Grealy struggled to follow up on the promise of her first book. A contract for a novel went unfulfilled; her 2000 essay collection, “As Seen on TV,” had a muted reception. “Autobiography of a Face” was subsumed into the nineteen-nineties memoir boom. “In an era when ‘Oprah’ reigns supreme and 12-step programs have been adopted as the new mantra, it’s perhaps only natural for literary confession to join the parade,” James Atlas wrote in a 1996 essay for the New York Times Magazine. He went on to name-check Grealy’s book as one of “two memoirs of facial disfigurement” recently published (the other was “Road Song,” by Natalie Kusz), which he cited, along with first-person accounts of alcoholism, mental illness, and sexual transgression, as an exemplar of an emergent “culture of confession.” The Atlas essay was just one entry in a long line of arguments over confessional writing and its merits. In 2014, when, after publishing a widely lauded collection of personal essays, “The Empathy Exams,” Leslie Jamison felt compelled to defend her chosen genre against the “bad rap” that it was “self-absorbed, solipsistic, self-indulgent,” she pointed to Grealy’s book as an example of the value of intimate first-person prose.

By the time Jamison was writing, such prose was seemingly everywhere: the growth of the blogosphere had opened the way for a “personal-essay boom” that has grown and shrunk but never totally gone away. Meanwhile, the therapeutic language and traumatic topics at which critics such as Atlas had looked askance in the nineties found more intense and widespread expression with social media. There are more chances than ever to feel the appeal and the agony of being seen—and, in reading “Autobiography of a Face” today, this is the aspect of Grealy’s insight that comes to the fore. Her experience taught her both the power and the abjection of a life lived on public display.

In an essay from “As Seen on TV,” about going on an unnamed daytime talk show, Grealy recalled first contemplating what it meant to be on TV, as a child watching footage of the Beatles at Shea Stadium. “Though I couldn’t articulate it this way at the time,” she wrote, “what I felt was that to be seen by that many people would somehow make you realer than other people.” She goes on to consider why someone might crave this sensation:

It’s easy to poke fun at the stupidity of celebrity, the shallowness of it, just as it’s easy to be righteously horrified by the twisted mess the visual media has made of the last century. But what if there’s something else at work here? For centuries various scientists have been trying to figure out how flocks of birds and schools of fish are able to move in perfect unison. . . . What if a species is to an individual what our sense of self is to our own cells? What if the desire to be famous, to be seen, is some vestigial memory of this, something we lost or forgot about a long time ago? What if being seen by the Others could call that other way of being back? Would we still feel so alone if this happened? What would it be like, to be, to be seen?

Grealy understood the power of celebrity on an intimate, almost cellular level. Just as she refused to dismiss the desire for beauty, she refused to scoff at a desire for fame; she saw why it might seem to offer access to the sublime. This moment of reverie in her essay is soon undercut by an encounter with a stalker. The tantalizing prospect of being seen is never without peril, and even as she testifies firsthand to its allure Grealy is clear-eyed about its risks. Her work explored the gap between a private self and a public appearance—a gap that, in her case, was dramatic, and represented by the mediating fact of her face. But in the time since “Autobiography of a Face” was published, technology (phone cameras, the social Internet) has made it easier for anyone to hone self-consciousness into a torture device. The rigor and empathy Grealy brings to her subject would have made her an uncommon critic today. ♦