![]() ![]() ![]() While her mother praises her “for being so good,” Lucy’s repeated efforts to deny her need to engage with her emotions, and release her pain and fear through crying, leave her feeling “absolutely nothing” and “only a void” (137). Time after time, she fails to stop herself from crying before, near the end of her two and half years of treatment, she finally stops weeping during chemotherapy. ![]() One must never, under any circumstances, show fear and, prime directive above all, one must never, ever cry” (29-30). She develops this into the most important component of her adopted code of conduct, that “ne had to be good. Symbolically, this is highlighted by her attempts to not cry, with her again focusing on the time when she was “courageous and didn’t cry and thus was good” (21). Lucy accepts this and makes every effort to suppress her emotions when she is around her mother, remembering her “first visit to the emergency room” where she had “been praised as good for being brave” which she took as “a formula for gaining acceptance” (30). The surgical removal of 1/3 of her jaw left her face unbearably disfigured. Diagnosed at age nine, as a young girl Lucy grows up feeling more comfortable in hospitals than out in the world. Unable to truly help her daughter, Lucy’s mother attempts to do so by telling her to be brave and encouraging her not to show pain or fear about her illness and medical treatment. Lucy Grealy, author of Autobiography of a Face, takes her readers step by painful step through her story, memories, and emotions of her life with jaw cancer. ![]()
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