Autobiography Of A Face

At Sarah Lawrence College, Lucy’s fellow students all cultivate “an air of being an outsider, beyond it all, utterly cool” (192). Lucy is delighted to find herself “having intense discussions about life, art, all the topics [she had] been craving for so long” and is surprised to find that everyone is “extraordinarily nice and even interested in” her (192). As she becomes friends with many of these new people, she grows to love the fact that they wear “their mantels as ‘outsiders’ with pride” (196),which makes her finally feel accepted.

Like her fellow students, Lucy goes through a “first-semester transformation” (192) and adopts an “I-don’t-care-I’m-an-artist look,” getting all her clothes “from the Bargain Box, the local thrift store” (193). Dressing this way is “an attempt not to care, to show the world” that she is not “concerned with what it thought of [her] face” and demonstrate “that [she] already [she] knew [she] was ugly” (194).

A central part of Lucy’s “antifashion statement” (193) is reading and writing poetry. In poetry, Lucy finds a way to “dwell in the realm of the senses,” “enter the world,” (193) and engage with others. She delights in the way “language itself, words and images, [can] be wrought and shaped into vessels for the truth and beauty [she] had so long hungered for” (193). She soon becomes a poetry “fanatic” (193).

Her previous skin grafts having all failed to hold, Lucy has another operation and finds the whole experience deeply traumatic. She becomes seriously ill and spends a week in Intensive Care with pneumonia. When she recovers enough to look at her reflection, she finds herself “undeniably repulsive,” the side of her face “obscenely swollen to the size of a football” (200). Her self-esteem descends to “the bottom of the deepest, darkest pit” (200).

When her friend, Greg, takes her out to a gay club to distract her from her pain, Lucy is surprised to find herself dancing, something she would not have done in a heterosexual club “in a million years” (202). She finds herself socializing more and more and even attending “parties populated by the likes of Andy Warhol, famous fashion designers, erstwhile rock stars” (203).

After she gets a bone graft that replaces the missing half of her jaw, Lucy “actually look[s] forward to seeing [herself] in the mirror” (204) and likes what she sees there. However, she is puzzled by the way she still does not “feel attractive” and wonders,“Where was all that relief and freedom that I thought came with beauty?” (204).

Lucy now has “many rich friendships” but remains convinced that “not having a lover” means that she is “unlovable” and proves that she is “too ugly” (205). At the same time, she is at least starting to“own [her] desires” (205),rather than suppressing them. However, she remains too upset and “consumed with self-pity” (206) to move beyond her fixation, believing that if she can “get someone to have sex with” her, then it will mean that she is “attractive, that someone could love [her]” (206).

At graduate school, she meets her first lover, Jude. He is “an older, handsome writer who [drives] an antique sports car […] [and] live[s] a difficult, interesting life” (207). Lucy and Jude begin “a highly charged sexual relationship” that is still, ultimately, “a disaster” (207). It does change Lucy’s relationship with sexuality and her own body, however, especially when Jude prompts her to dress “more like ‘a woman’” (207).

Soon, Lucy is “dressing provocatively” and showing off her “sexy body” (207), using it as a way “to distract people from [her] face” (208). The attention she receives makes her “feel worthy” and she begins “collecting lovers, having a series of short-term relationships” (208). However, she believes that these relationships all end because she is not “beautiful enough” (208).

Compounding this, the bone graft, like the skin grafts before it, is slowly failing and being reabsorbed by her body. She is unsuccessful at getting funding for a further operation and settles on “a geographic cure” (212) instead, travelling to West Berlin to fuel “every romantic notion [she has] about living the bohemian life” (213). She fantasizes about writing “the ultimate poem about beauty and truth” and “the great transatlantic trashy novel” (212).

“Running low on funds,” (213), Lucy moves to London, to live with her sister. In an experience that resembles being back in “junior high school all over again,” she regularly encounters drunk men “teasing me, calling me ugly, thinking it hysterically funny to challenge one another to ask me out on a date” (213). In part, it is this that encourages her to try a new medical procedure that “might finally fix [her] face, fix [her] life” (215).

Lucy spends three months in a hospital in Scotland undergoing a long, complex procedure followed by “an almost thirteen-hour operation” (216). Afterwards, her face is “beginning to look acceptable” (217) but the “the original bone on the left side of [her] jaw” (217) begins to shrink. She spends several months undergoing the procedure again on the left side of her face.

After the second operation, Lucy has “to admit” that she “look[s] better” (219). However, she finds that her face does not “look like [her]” (219) and, looking in the mirror, cannot “conceive of the image as belonging to [her]” (220). She entirely avoids looking at her reflection “for almost a year” (220).

Slowly, she begins a long “journey back to [her] face” (220), gradually accepting that her belief that attaining “physical beauty” (221) would fix all her problems is inaccurate. She recognizes that, “for all those years,” she has been “hand[ing] [her] ugliness over to people” and has “seen only the different ways it was reflected back to” her (222). She finally begins to let go of this image of herself, embracing her new face and a new life. Only then can she look at her reflection again, “to see if [she] [can], now, recognize [her]self” (223).