ShelfLook
Tools About
Cover of Autobiography of a Face

How long does it take to read Autobiography of a Face?

Lucy Grealy

Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy takes about 4 hours 13 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 4 hours 13 minutes

A weekend read

First published 1994. 230 pages, about 63,250 words.

9 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 7 hours 2 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 4 hours 13 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 2 hours 38 minutes

The page count is the median across 8 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

Lucy Grealy's ruthless self-examination, rich fantasy life, and great derring-do inform this powerful memoir about the premium we put on beauty and on a woman's face in particular. It took Lucy twenty years of living with a distorted self-image and more than thirty reconstructive procedures before she could come to terms with her appearance after childhood surgery left her jaw disfigured. As a young girl she absorbed the searing pain of peer rejection and the guilty pleasures of wanting to be special. Later she internalized the paralyzing fear of never being loved. Heroically and poignantly, she learned to define herself from the inside out. . This memoir arrives at a time when the worship of beauty in our culture is at an all-time high, a time when more and more women seek physical perfection. Lucy Grealy awakens in us the difficult truth that beauty, finally, is to be found deep within.

Subjects: Sarcoma, Ewing's, Body Image, Disfigured persons, Psychology, Jaw Neoplasms, Patients

Books like this

Popular books of similar length