A NYT article over the weekend talked about Frank McCourt and a host of memoirs in the mid-eighties that were part of a trend that has yet to abate. In the list of memoirs were two books I had edited when I worked at Houghton Mifflin: Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation. Both were acquired modestly and each had a small first print run. Both books had a brilliant jacket and inside were stories about self image, depression, and the search for love. As an editor you feel defined by the books you work on: these two said it all for me. As luck would have it, each had a devoted publicist and, while this is a romantic way to say it, publishing magic was made. And a fact of which I am impossibly proud, both books are still in print these many years later. One more thing: My daughter’s new school gave out a summer reading list of books the kids could choose from. Lucy’s book was on it. That’s all.
Filed under: Authors |
Betsy Lerner 
I read Grealy’s Autobiography years ago when I took a memoir course at Gotham with Valerie Vogrin (a great teacher). I was just beginning to learn about memoir, and was struck by the warts-and-all honesty of her prose. It was a far cry from the medical memoirs I grew up reading in Reader’s Digest. It just goes to show that even the oft-clichéd story of survival in defiance of the odds can be resuscitated, and maybe the reader along with it.
I was sad when I read that Lucy Grealy had died in 2002. After I had finished reading her memoir, she had felt so alive to me. She still does. It seems so unfair that she should be cheated of so much life in terms of her horrible struggles with childhood cancer, to overcome it in the form of her memoir and then die relatively young at 39 apparently of an accidental heroin overdose. But she leaves a wonderful legacy to her readers in her memoir. There are layers of meaning to this story that bear thinking on.
And Betsy’s too modest to mention that as Lucy Grealy’s editor it was she who found the photo that made the perfect cover for that book. (The story is in “The Forest For The Trees”.) I know authors who would kill for such a great cover.
Wait a sec. Memoir is a “trend”? I have to read up on this.
Mirror makers know the secret – one does not make a mirror to resemble a person, one brings a person to the mirror.
Jack Spicer
Good job, Ms. Lerner
My husband first read Autobiography of a Face, and then told me how wonderful it was. I loved it, too, and we’ve recommended it to friends ever since. We’ve even suggested it as one of those town-wide reads. Neither of us knew Lucy Grealy at all, but were so sad when she died. What a loss.