I found Autobiography of a Face to be consistently relatable. But as Grealy explains: “that memory has significance because of the way my life has unfolded.” Today it seems as though time stopped while I sipped my red wine and Jeff slipped away to the bathroom to cough up his oyster. Like Grealy, my memory of that moment is more pivotal than the moment actually was. It seems like only two scenes later (in fact it was just four months later) that we were saying goodbye to him as he died of complications from esophageal cancer. I remember when my late partner popped an oyster into his mouth at happy hour and then couldn’t swallow it. I can relate to looking back at an innocent moment that would later reverberate like a tragic movie plot. There would be many surgeries to follow and multiple misdiagnoses before they would find the cancer that would change her life – and her face forever. Grealy is describing the moment when a collision during an innocent childhood game knocked her to the asphalt of her primary school, and she felt – for the first time – a pain in her jaw. In everyday life, where we cough often and are always bumping into people, our daily actions rarely reverberate so lucidly.” – Lucy Grealy “When a film’s heroine innocently coughs, you know that two scenes later, at most, she’ll be in an oxygen tent when a man bumps into a woman at the train station, you know that man will become the woman’s lover and/or murderer.
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