Abigail Mechley

Intro to Lit & Cultural Studies

ENG 298
Spring 2017

Authorship and Intent: Why Lucy Grealy Matters to Autobiography of a Face

If the author has been killed numerous times in literary history, by critics such as Roland

Barthes and Michel Foucault, memoir is one means by which the author is resurrected. Though

Lucy Grealy has been dead fifteen years, Autobiography of a Face presents an example of

writing in which recognizing the author’s personhood—her faults, experiences, and

perspective—is, or should be, essential in how the work exists and is read.

Barthes would likely disagree; the author, he might say, has no place dictating how

readers should experience the book; the author should have no bearing on how “artful” or

“meaningful” the piece is; instead, “it is language which speaks, not the author” (Barthes 254).

Perhaps he is partially correct, in that language mediates communication, but this concept of

impartiality and empowering readers would imply that Grealy’s own experiences have no

bearing on the contents of Autobiography; should this book have been written as pure fiction,

containing the same words in the same order, would it still have the same merits? The same

meaning? Would the emotional and physical trauma “feel” as raw and vulnerable if Grealy

wasn’t telling the story of her own life? To all of these, I issue a resounding “no.” The value of

Autobiography lies within Grealy’s effort to present her own story, one that had actual, lived

repercussions. Barthes might counter, saying, “Did [the author] wish to express himself, he ought

at least to know that the inner ‘thing’ he thinks to ‘translate’ is itself only a ready-formed

dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely” (256). Yet

this ignores that readers, in the process of comprehension, cannot truly escape the language of

the author; Wayne Booth explains that “even when we resist a story, even when we view it

dispassionately, it immerses us in ‘the thoughts of another,’ unless we simply stop listening”

(353, emphasis added). Reading usually requires the audience to follow conventions the writer

sets forth—the order events occur in, which direction to read in—because to read at all is to

understand what an author has first written down. And the significance of Grealy’s work as a

memoir does, in fact, do much “to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final

significance, to close the writing” (Barthes 256)—but only in the sense that Autobiography

would not exist in the same way except in relation to Grealy’s life, and once you know the nature

of the book, you cannot view it as independently conceived or pure aesthetics or separate from

Grealy herself.

One theme in Autobiography that could offer insight on what readers gain by taking on

another’s thoughts and identity was Grealy’s own struggle with language and the difficulties of

understanding others. She tried to step back from the literal words of her mother (“that there was

no need to cry, that everything would be alright, that I mustn’t cry” [Grealy 68]), asking, “What

did my mother mean?” (69) in an effort to reconstruct the underlying intention of what her mom

tried (but was perhaps unable) to say. Her hope in pulling apart language is a very human desire

to know what others are thinking, to inhabit another’s thoughts and understand them as separate

but human. This becomes a difficult task since both communication and interpretation are

fraught with error; Grealy explains, “Language supplies us with ways to express even subtler

levels of meaning, but does that imply language gives meaning, or robs us of it when we are at a

loss to name things?” (33). Language clearly has significant benefits, in that it allows great

specificity and common understanding, and limitations, in that it can never quite encompass all

thought without first transforming it—some thought resists this transformation. Yet we humans

want to capture it anyway, somehow, even if the result is only an approximation of meaning; our

own inability to capture meaning compels us to seek out those who are capable of doing so,
authors and orators whose command of language calls forth that which was elusive. In turn, we

realize that language is often tainted—“corrupted,” Rabinowitz says—and requires some level of

patience with what others say, since language is so often imperfect in execution.

In this sense, then, “it does not follow that authors have total control over the act of

writing, anymore than readers have total control over the act of interpretation” (Rabinowitz 260);

though the author may not be breathing down readers’ necks, demanding they realize that these

blue curtains represent sadness and those worn hammocks represent marriage, a good author

realizes that she can only convey so much, and a good reader realizes that he will never have

access to the text’s meaning in the same way the author does. This facilitates a level of

communication with the text as a mediating force, rather than a defining force. If the reader

chooses to recognize his own power over the text while also seeking to understand the author’s,

another issue is added with Autobiography. Here, Grealy is trying to recount memories from her

actual lived experience, which adds an extra challenge (memories are frequently difficult to

define, and sometimes one can forget important things and remember events that never occurred)

and an extra opportunity (to write what subjectively feels “real” and hope readers will identify

with it).

This relates directly to another facet of Grealy’s belief about writing, which is that it

could create, or carry, truth. When she was still in high school and dealing with her low self-

esteem, she says, she discovered how incredible poetry could be: “The poem’s power over me

came from the author’s unassailable ability to say what felt so right and true” (156). With her

internalized belief in her ugliness, she saw writing as an escape into some greater meaning, not

just because the words on a page were arranged so as to create meaning, but because they were

imbued with the personhood of the writer, and all the potential failings that entails. Once arriving
at college and majoring in poetry, she expanded her view of language from something that could

“rob us [of meaning]” and said that “Language itself, words and images, could be wrought and

shaped into vessels for the truth and beauty I had so long hungered for.” Again, here, writing is

an act of shaping, controlling language; writing is a process, not a by-product. And for readers of

Autobiography, this explanation gives insight into why Grealy may have written this book;

instead of a desire to become famous or renowned as a great writer, perhaps Grealy was

motivated by controlling her past through language. By writing Autobiography, Grealy had the

means to paradoxically capture and release the experiences she went through; she could use

language to define them, enforcing a specific viewpoint and order and style into her story, and

she could use language to expose them, handing the final copy over to the world for others to

find new meaning, to, as Terry Eagleton said, “show the text as it cannot know itself”

(Rabinowitz 264).

A final point, this on the matter of Grealy’s actual (though not, necessarily, authorial)

death. While her death isn’t a completely transparent case, there is little doubt that it changed

how the book was received by readers and critics. Grealy’s use of heroin and her eventual

overdose serves to legitimize the struggles she faces throughout the book, granting

Autobiography a greater ethos than could have existed prior to her death. After all, with any

memoir or autobiography, there is usually doubt cast on how pure the author’s intentions are; is

he or she attempting to weave a story for the sake of taking my money? How much of this really

happened? Does it matter if the story is true or not if it’s well-written, as Barthes seems to

believe? Regardless, Grealy’s death cemented her account as “real”: she could no longer

challenge or refute or present new interpretations of her story, and her heroin addiction showed

that her surgeries and struggles had an actual, measurable, and painful impact in her life. Her
death silenced any more dissent on whether she was taking liberties in her account of suffering

and courage; after all, not only did her heroin use stem directly from painkillers used in her

surgeries, but the ambiguity of whether she took her own life leaves few wanting to further pick

apart her book for a sense of what is or isn’t “true.” Readers expect that this “truth” must exist in

Autobiography of a Face, at least for Lucy Grealy herself.

 Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “Death of the Author.” Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading

Literature, edited by David H. Richter, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000, pp. 253-257.

Booth, Wayne C. “Who is Responsible in Ethical Criticism, and for What?” Falling into Theory:

Conflicting Views on Reading Literature, edited by David H. Richter, Bedford/St.

Martin’s, 2000, pp. 349-355.

Grealy, Lucy. Autobiography of a face. Boston, Mariner Books, 2016.

Rabinowitz, Peter. “Actual Reader and Authorial Reader.” Falling into Theory: Conflicting

Views on Reading Literature, edited by David H. Richter, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000, pp.

258-266.