Lucy Grealy's Autobiography Of A Face

No matter one’s career choice, family life, ethnicity, or culture, finding and owning one’s personal identity is a persistent struggle that can last an entire lifetime. One is surrounded by media and messages feigning “the perfect life” which begin to consume one’s thoughts with “what if’s” or “if only’s”. Lucy Grealy struggles with defining her self-image in her autobiography, Autobiography of a Face. Throughout Grealy’s accounts of her battle with cancer, bullies, and her self-esteem, readers get a raw, painful, yet incredibly relatable look into the elements that can contribute to self-image. In writing Autobiography of a Face, Grealy leaves readers with a chilling lesson: only readers themselves, not family, peers, the media or society, can choose how to define their lives. One must choose wisely and continually combat the world’s messages, for self-image can set the stage for one’s entire life.
Grealy’s struggles with self-esteem reveal the fluidity of
Constantly performing for her mother was exhausting, “When dealing with my mother, one always had to act in a delicate and prescribed way, though the exact rules of protocol seemed to shift frequently and without advance notice” (9). Despite Grealy’s determination to prove herself to her mom, she often feels like she has failed and takes personal responsibility for the family’s issues:
Though our whole family shared the burden of my mother’s anger, in my heart I suspected that part of it was my fault and my fault alone. Cancer is an obscenely expensive illness; I saw the bills, I heard their fights. There was no doubt that I was personally responsible for a great deal of my family’s money problems: ergo, I was responsible for my mother’s unhappy life