The Unexpected Afterlife of 'Autobiography of a Face'

I first learned about Lucy Grealy in Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams. Grealy had written a book with a title that Jamison had, while an English student at Harvard in the early 2000s, imagined using for her own memoir: Autobiography of a Face. The fact that Jamison had not heard of Grealy’s 1994 hit suggests that it had, within just a few years of its publication, fallen into relative obscurity. Autobiography of a Face—which chronicles Grealy’s disfiguring childhood cancer and reconstructive facial surgeries—was, upon its release, a bestseller and the subject of interviews with Terry Gross, Charlie Rose, CNN, and the Today show. It was a sensation then and is a painfully resonant work in our image-obsessed, plastic surgery culture now.