I can think of no better....

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        ....example of writing the physical reality of our bodies than Lucy Grealey's celebrated and breathtaking 2016 memoir Autobiography of a Face.

        When she was nine, Grealey was taken out of school to be treated for a deadly cancer. When she came back, she was greatly altered, with a third of her jaw removed. Hers is a story of unbearable suffering, both physical and mental. Of physical pain and mental excoriation.

         Grealey takes her readers to the crucible location where bodies meet images of bodies. She considers the ways our bodies can betray us. The way the received ideas of beauty can brutalize and scar us.

       “This singularity of meaning--I was my face," Grealey writes, "I was ugliness--though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape. It became the launching pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked what was wrong with my life. Everything led to it, everything receded from it--my face as personal vanishing point.”

       

             Grealey's book gave me pause to examine my an evolving sense of my own beauty, sometimes there, sometimes not. That changeable ethereal thing that is our reflection; the ways we own that. I always reach for the books that explore the corporeal and the sensual, the experience of health, illness and image.  There are shelves and shelves of memoirs that parse the idea of our containers, as billboards, as our buddies and our betrayers, but none as powerful -- in my estimation --as Grealeys. 

            Write your body and you write your truth, a professor once told me. At the time, I found it reductive. Today, I consider it gospel.           

            Collected here you will find occasional some excerpts from memoirists that go there. Like Grealey, but each with their own winning style and story strategy. Read some of these and then try your own...