SOURCE: "Staring Pain in the Face," London Review of Books, March, 1995, p. 16.

[In the following review, Robbins asserts that in Autobiography of a Face Lucy Grealy "has created a beautifully written re-creation of and meditation on her illness and treatment, growing up, love, and the years spent being her face."]

At the age of nine, Lucy Grealy learned she had Ewing's sarcoma. An operation removed the tumor along with half of her jaw, and was followed by two years of radiation treatment and two and a half years of chemotherapy. Her chances of survival were around five percent.

I had my own preconceptions of what Lucy Grealy's account of her illness and its effect on her life would be. Eleven years ago I could have been sitting with Grealy's mother in the hospital. My daughter wasn't ill—she had been hit by a car just before her eleventh...