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Each teaching semester at Penn I choose the memoirs I want the class to dwell on, learn from.  The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  The Duke of Deception.  House of Prayer No. 2.  Running in the Family.  Slices from Annie Dillard, Patricia Hampl, Vivian Gornick, the memoiristic poetry of Pablo Neruda. More.

This semester we're reading three, and this weekend I was preparing my notes for our coming discussion of Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face, a book with so much to teach that I filled six pages with citations and notes and sent my students more consider-this questions than perhaps a teacher should.  As a child, Lucy has cancer.  As a teen and young woman she endures more than thirty surgeries—first to remove the tumor from her jaw, then to try to resurrect her face.  That's the back story, but it isn't the reason this is such teach-worthy memoir.  I will teach Lucy Grealy tomorrow because of her reach—her attempt to make sense, her generosity, her thematic juxtapositions.

Autobiography is full of passages such as this:

By the end of my freshmen year I'd gained a reputation as one of the better poets on campus, which aided the development of my artistic persona.  How trivial to actually think about one's appearance.  The attire of my fellow scruffy artists told the world to recognize them as geniuses too preoccupied to care about anything as mundane as clothes.  But for me, dressing as if I didn't care was an attempt not to care, to show the world I wasn't concerned with what it thought of my face. In my carefully orchestrated shabbiness, I was hoping to beat the world to the finish line by showing that I already knew I was ugly.  Still, all the while, I was secretly hoping that in the process some potential lover might accidentally notice I was wearing my private but beautiful heart on my stained and fraying sleeve.

This is my home, my table where I sit with family and friends.  Tomorrow I'll take this spirit of community (pretend there are flowers, pretend there are candles), and we'll talk.

  

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The high, sweet smell of an overripe Bartlett pear, sun that falls silver on the branch across the way, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly read through this morning, a promise I kept for myself. I'd watched the movie a few weeks ago and couldn't get it out of my head, nor was there any reason to: It is a bright pirouette of a film, an affirmation.

Appreciated even more now, in light of this masterful book, this memoir, a mere 132, big-type pages long and steeped. Bauby, the former editor, rendered locked-in by a massive stroke and speaking through the blinking of one eye. Letters read off to him until he consents to one and then another. Words congealing. Story. Hope.

Most of us are blessed with hands that grip pens, fingers that do our calling on keyboards. And yet we are, perhaps, tempted to hurry through scenes for the love of writing the next one, or to subsume a detail not readily recalled, or to lean on a familiar turn of phrase because the melody is familiar (I have done these things; I confess). If we are, if I do, I will again read Bauby, to be reminded of what a man blinking each letter into place can achieve with language and with heart:

The lighthouse and I remain in constant touch, and I often call on it by having myself wheeled to Cinecitta, a region essential to my imaginary geography of the hospital. Cincecitta is the perpetually deserted terrace of Sorrel ward. Facing south, its vast balconies open onto a landscape heavy with the poetic and slightly offbeat charm of a movie set. The suburbs of Berck look like a model-train layout. A handful of buildings at the foot of the sand dunes gives the illusion of a Western ghost town. As for the sea, it foams such an incandescent white that it might be the product of the special-effects department.

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