SOURCE: "Facing the World," in Belles Lettres, Spring, 1995, p. 53.

[In the following positive review, Loup relates her reticence as a cancer survivor at reading Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face, but finds that "Grealy learns to look in the mirror and accept what she sees: the reader privileged to have shared her mirror can do no less."]

Unlike many readers who anticipated the appearance of Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face after first reading her article "Mirrorings" in Harper's, I read the book first. Knowing only that the memoir deals with the author's facial disfigurement following cancer treatment as a child, I approached it cautiously. With my own cancer treatment so recently behind me, I feared that if Grealy's work were shallow, shoddy, sensational, or in any other way mediocre, it would, at the very least, disappoint by its lack of insight and, at worst, could even debase...