Autobiography Of A Face

Lucy plays with plastic animals in her garden and insists on leaving them outside at all times. When her mother says that this means that she is not looking after them properly, she cannot explain that it is “crucial for [Lucy], safe inside [her] bed at night, to think of them out there, living their continuous lives regardless of [her] presence” (89). She loves to imagine them “braving the weather,” and believes that the animals’ world continues, “constant and sure” (89), even when she is “stuck inside, too sick to get out of bed” (89). She also frequently plays make-believe, pretending to be a Pony Express rider or an alien.

The one time that Lucy is “completely [her]self” (90) and cannot pretend to be someone and somewhere else, is on Fridays, when she has to go for her treatment with Dr. Woolf and experience “feelings of shame and guilt for failing to not suffer” (90). The radiation treatment is making her progressively more unwell, leading to rapid weight loss, pain, nausea, and open sores in her mouth.

Lucy becomes “willing to try anything to get out of the weekly chemo shots” (94), including trying to make herself ill. She tries going out in the “icy rain” (94) and lying down “on the cold wet grass” (95), “drinking dishwasher liquid” (96), and her “pet project” (96) of trying to swallow water in order to get pneumonia, and even “scratching [her] arms with rusty nails [she finds] lying on the street” (97).

Watching programs like Father Knows Best and The Brady Bunch, Lucy imagines how those families would deal with her condition, imagining that “everything would be talked about, everything dealt with” (98). She begins receiving letters and pamphlets from Christian groups and begins to long for the certainties and reassurances they offer, craving “this light, this peace, this glow” (99).

When Lucy’s father loses his job, Lucy loses his medical coverage. Although inferior, her mother’s coverage, “for some inexplicable reason” (100), pays for an ambulance to take Lucy to the hospital for her treatments. She is initially excited by this prospect but actually feels “self-conscious and awkward” (101) when the ambulance first picks her up in front of a circle of watching neighbors. She wonders if, having grown up wanting “to be special, to be different,” she is actually “the creator of [her] own situation” (101) and somehow responsible for her own illness.

The chemotherapy begins to make Lucy’s hair fall out. When she first notices, she begins to cry. Her mother reminds her that she “had known this would happen” so she “shouldn’t get so upset” (103) but this only makesLucy “cry harder” (103).

Previously, Lucy had “never thought much about [her] hair” and any compliments she had received about it “had never particularly interested” her (103). She now finds the process of losing her hair troubling but remains in denial about it and keeps herself “ignorant of the details of [her] appearance” (104) more generally.

When Lucy looks at herself in the mirror, she does so “with a preoccupied preadolescent view” (104), looking but not judging herself. She remains largely unaffected by “the first taunts and teases” and shouts of “Baldy or Dog Girl” (105) that are levelled at her by strangers, recognizing that “their comments [are] meant to impress each other more than harm [Lucy]” (105). She is protected by “a strong sense of [her]self,” living “vividly in [her] world of hospitals and animals and fantasy” (105), and has “no sense of [her]self in relation to the ‘normal’ people” (105).

Eventually, at her mother’s suggestion, Lucy simply shaves off her thinning hair and begins wearing “a small white sailor’s hat” which she will “almost never [take] off for the next two and a half years” (105). The hat becomes a “barrier between [her], and what [she] was vaguely becoming aware of as ugly about [her], and the world” (106). It does not occur to her that “the whole picture, even with the hat, was ugly” (106). When the teasing continues, “both from strangers and from the very boys whom [Lucy had] once regarded as friends” (106), Lucy begins to wonder whether it is, as she has previously believed, only her baldness that makes her stand out as a figure of ridicule.

After a visit to a wigmaker makes Lucy more aware of others’ views of her as abnormal-looking, she starts to wonder if she“might look much worse than [she] had supposed” and decides to “very carefully, very seriously, [assess her] face in the mirror” (111). She is shocked and horrified by the sunken appearance caused by the loss of half of her jaw bone. However, even more than her reaction to “the ugliness” (111) is a feeling of being “suddenly appalled at the notion that [she has] been walking around unaware of something that was apparent to everyone else (111-12). She is consumed by “a profound sense of shame” (112) and goes to lie “in the sunlight with the cats” because they do not care about her appearance.

When Lucy does eventually get ill, it is not because of a conscious effort to make herself sick, nor is it as liberating as she had hoped. She ends up in isolation and finds it much more boring and unpleasant than she had expected. She only manages to tolerate the boredom of having almost nothing to entertain her by pretending to be a prisoner being held “in the hole” (115) for a crime that she did not commit.