Figurative Language In Lucy Grealy's Autobiography Of A Face

Surgical precision is necessary when attempting to transform an ugly life experience into a transcendent reading experience. Often, seasoned writers and critical readers dismiss the discussion of word choice and figurative language as pedantic and pedestrian, the importance of each is a given. However, word choice and figurative language are the backbone of all writing. They are the spine from which the vertebra of all literary technique grow. In the absence of the mastery of either, a writer stands little chance of executing an engaging work. It’s mastery, mastery of word-choice, mastery of figurative language, which makes Autobiography of a Face a “triumph.” Though Lucy Grealy has given readers a survival story as well as an astute study …show more content…
For many, the quantifiable experience of cancer is yet unknowable, but most readers recognize that “the insecurities drove everyone like some looming, evil presence in a haunted machine”. By transforming the corporeal experience of adolescence into something ethereal, Grealy mimics the uncanny experience of youth. Readers don’t pity Grealy because she so deftly describes the surprisingly universal occurrence of metamorphosis, albeit one drawn from particularly singular experience. Autobiography of a Face isn’t a story about cancer. It isn’t a story about difference, and it sure as hell isn’t a story about “the triumph of the human spirit”. It’s a story of universality. It’s a story about naming the unnamable experience of being human, and because Grealy so perfectly utilizes figurative language and choses each word with surgical precision, she makes her unique state of being into an encounter that readers not only understand, but relish. Suffering and joy cannot be named. There is no true vocabulary for the profound states of humanness, but when in the hands of a great writer these conditions are signified,