Thirty years ago, Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face launched the young writer into the top echelons of contemporary literature, winning her both acclaim and fame. An incandescent tale of perseverance, humor, and deep introspection in the face of emotional and physical pain, her powerful memoir—as evocative and resonant today as it was in 1994—speaks to us across time. 

At age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare form of childhood cancer, undergoing years of chemotherapy that destroyed a third of her jawbone. It took her twenty years of living with the resulting disfigurement and a distorted self-image, plus more than thirty reconstructive procedures, before she began to come to terms with her appearance. This beautiful, timeless memoir is a tale of great suffering and remarkable strength, told without sentimentality and with considerable wit. In this unflinching coming-of-age story, Grealy reflects on how cancer transformed her face and her life, and captures what it was like as a child and a young adult to be torn between wanting to be loved for who we are and desperately wishing to be perfect.