SOURCE: "I Was Too Ugly to Go to School," in The New York Times Book Review, September 25, 1994, pp. 11-12.

[Below, Mojtabai offers a positive review of Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face, praising the author's first published work as an account that "struggles from outer to inner to inmost senses of "face" as it charts the difficulties encountered in trying to carve a face for oneself from the inside out."]

You should begin Autobiography of a Face, a poet's memoir in which no words are approximate or unfelt, by pausing to give its title due weight. All that is to follow is packed into the substitution of "face" for "person," "self" or "soul." The suggested equivalency is startling—yet not foreign, not utterly strange.

Consider your relationship to your own face, how deeply internalized it is and, at the same time, how dependent on mediation—reflection in mirrors...