Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy

I was in a quilting class talking about Ann Patchett, her non-fiction writing in general and her book Truth and Beauty, which is about her friendship with the author of this book, and one of my fellow classmates asked if I had read this and recommended it. I had not. I liked but did not love this book, and the reasons may be complicated. One is that I really loved Patchett's book, and knew a lot of the details told her and more already. The other is that I am the parent of a childhood cancer survivor, and so it hews close to the bone for me, but from the parent's side, and they do not fair particularly well here. Then there is the part where the fact this involves a potentially dying child isn’t even the bleakest part of her story. This is the kind of subject matter that almost always lends itself to cliché; this does not veer into that territory. When Grealy was nine, she was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in her jaw. After a few false diagnoses, she had one-third of her jaw removed and then underwent an intensive course of chemotherapy and radiation. On the one hand she was lucky to survive--on the other her face was forever scarred and left the author similarly scarred on the inside as well. It is not a sob story, trust me, I cried ALL THE WAY THROUGH John Green's book The Fault In Our Stars, when the story veers into the losses childhood cancer robs people of, I am a sucker. I have imagined it all and lived a good deal of it. Not so in this one. It is just the cold hard facts of severe illness as something that can be grown up with but not escaped.