Grealy felt at first that by suffering heroically, ''I could save the entire family.'' But as her endless and crushingly expensive ordeal continued, she realized that her face, more than her own and her family's fortune, was her very self-image and life. Grealy stayed home, rearing the children. Grealy commuted to work as a producer for ABC and CBS in New York, while Mrs.
They had been well-known journalists in Ireland - her father had helped found RTE, Ireland's national broadcasting organization - and then they felt stuck in the suburbs. In addition to her twin, Sarah Louise Barasch, she is survived by her mother and two siblings who live in London, her brother Nicholas and her sister Suellen Grealy Vlaveanos.Īfter settling the family in Spring Valley, N.Y., her parents saw themselves as fallen aristocrats. Her family immigrated to the United States in 1967 when she was 4. She and her twin sister, Sarah Louise, were the youngest of five children, who included her older brothers, Sean and Nicholas, and another sister, Suellen. Lucinda Margaret Grealy, whose last name is pronounced GRAY-lee, was born in Dublin to Desmond and Trena Anne Grealy. Older boys at her school would yell, ''That is the ugliest girl I have ever seen.'' She herself concluded, ''I was too ugly to go to school.''īut she was also proud and determined, Ms.
Over the next 18 years she underwent about 30 more operations to rebuild her face. But with radiation and chemotherapy, she survived. After several more operations, half her jaw was gone, and only flesh remained on the lower right side of her face. Grealy described how she underwent surgery at 9 for what seemed to be a dental cyst, but which led to a diagnosis of Ewing's sarcoma, a rare and virulent cancer. | Disfigured persons - United States - Biography.In the book, Ms. | Ewing's sarcoma - Patients - United States - Biography. Lucy Grealy awakens in us the difficult truth that beauty, finally, is to be found deep within. This memoir arrives at a time when the worship of beauty in our culture is at an all-time high, a time when more and more women seek physical perfection. Heroically and poignantly, she learned to define herself from the inside out. Later she internalized the paralyzing fear of never being loved. As a young girl she absorbed the searing pain of peer rejection and the guilty pleasures of wanting to be special.
It took Lucy twenty years of living with a distorted self-image and more than thirty reconstructive procedures before she could come to terms with her appearance after childhood surgery left her jaw disfigured. Lucy Grealy's ruthless self-examination, rich fantasy life, and great derring-do inform this powerful memoir about the premium we put on beauty and on a woman's face in particular. Autobiography of a face / Lucy Grealy Book Bib ID
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