teaching Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face

Each teaching semester at Penn I choose the memoirs I want the class to dwell on, learn from.  The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  The Duke of Deception.  House of Prayer No. 2.  Running in the Family.  Slices from Annie Dillard, Patricia Hampl, Vivian Gornick, the memoiristic poetry of Pablo Neruda. More.

This semester we're reading three, and this weekend I was preparing my notes for our coming discussion of Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face, a book with so much to teach that I filled six pages with citations and notes and sent my students more consider-this questions than perhaps a teacher should.  As a child, Lucy has cancer.  As a teen and young woman she endures more than thirty surgeries—first to remove the tumor from her jaw, then to try to resurrect her face.  That's the back story, but it isn't the reason this is such teach-worthy memoir.  I will teach Lucy Grealy tomorrow because of her reach—her attempt to make sense, her generosity, her thematic juxtapositions.

Autobiography is full of passages such as this:

By the end of my freshmen year I'd gained a reputation as one of the better poets on campus, which aided the development of my artistic persona.  How trivial to actually think about one's appearance.  The attire of my fellow scruffy artists told the world to recognize them as geniuses too preoccupied to care about anything as mundane as clothes.  But for me, dressing as if I didn't care was an attempt not to care, to show the world I wasn't concerned with what it thought of my face. In my carefully orchestrated shabbiness, I was hoping to beat the world to the finish line by showing that I already knew I was ugly.  Still, all the while, I was secretly hoping that in the process some potential lover might accidentally notice I was wearing my private but beautiful heart on my stained and fraying sleeve.

This is my home, my table where I sit with family and friends.  Tomorrow I'll take this spirit of community (pretend there are flowers, pretend there are candles), and we'll talk.

  

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celebrating Patricia Hampl and other fine memoirists in HANDLING THE TRUTH

In returning the proof pages of Handling the Truth to Gotham yesterday, I relinquished all further control over the story.  No more changes.  No allowable regrets.  The book will soon be set in stone and released next August.

One of my greatest joys, in writing Handling the Truth, was the chance it gave me to celebrate the many memoirs—true memoirs, not autobiographies—that have inspired me throughout the years.  Natalie Kusz is there—the author of the first memoir I ever read.  C.K. Williams.  Marie Arana.  Mary Karr.  Anthony Shadid.  bell hooks.  Katrina Kenison.  Darin Strauss.  Dani Shapiro.  Rahna Reiko Rizzuto.  Buzz Bissinger.  Colleen Mondor.  Sy Montgomery.  Chris Offutt.  Elizabeth McCracken.  Lucy Grealy.  So many others. 

But no book about the making of memoir would ever be complete without a celebration of Patricia Hampl, who has done so much to shape the form.  Here, above, is a glimpsed moment.

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