Sometimes we make difficult choices. Yet with hindsight, much of what felt like tough decisions seem like they couldn’t have gone any other way – choosing love over wealth, peace over a career, or whatever your priorities were.
A lot of times we also sigh about people’s sad endings and try to make sense of them – They had a difficult life, maybe they got tired of swimming against the tide. Yet a troubled life shouldn’t incarcerate you to a lifetime of unhappiness, let alone to a sad end.
And if everything can be explained and contained by nature/nurture, if determinism is true, what does one make of Free Will? Isn’t the lack of it terrifying, if nature-nurture doesn’t bode well?
Lucy Grealy was a talented author and a poet. She was diagnosed with Ewing’s carcinoma at 9, a rare form of cancer to treat which a portion of her jaw was removed. Her cancer was cured but it left her with only 6 teeth, and she underwent 30+ surgeries through her teen and adult years to reconstruct her jaw and to look “normal”. Lucy died in 2002 at 39 of a heroin overdose.
Around this time last year I read her Autobiography of a Face (1994). At the time I was going through an emotional upheaval following a litany of poor decisions. The book was not uplifting (it’s not meant to be).
Lucy recounts events from her life starting from childhood through her early 20s, her matter-of-fact and often stoic tone hitting harder as she moves from one tragic memory to another. During her chemo sessions, she says, her mother would chide the nine-year old Lucy for crying, while fighting through tears herself, for weakness was a sin and one had to be brave in the face of pain. When her father accompanied her to chemotherapy, he would drop her off and wait in his car to pick her up after, cos he couldn’t bear to see his kid in pain. Adult Lucy says while young Lucy preferred her father’s absence to the guilt and shame she felt when her mother was present, she now wonders how a parent could abandon their kid that way. And while she might have later realized her mother was trying hard herself and not really chastising, Lucy equated silence with strength and grew to be an adult who didn’t cry when in pain.
In Truth & Beauty, Ann Patchett writes about the two of them attending Iowa Writers’ Workshop and their ensuing friendship, about how a lot of Lucy’s distress came from looking different, and how Lucy grew addicted to her painkillers. But halfway through Lucy’s autobiography her story already feels heavy without adding the T&B pieces to the timeline, including a constant pursuit to validate her desirability in her 20s and 30s, as well as the emotional and very physical exertions of her surgeries.
Lucy says she would walk into rooms filled with people and ask herself, Who here could’ve gone through what I did and stayed strong the way I did? The answer was always None.
Sad endings are scary because they reflect our own fears. I’m not simply sympathizing with Lucy two decades later, I’m also terrified (or was a year ago when I wrote my first draft). Because like I said, so many of my poor decisions and my even worse responses to them seemed inevitable when given the context of the rest of my life. So the idea that all one really does might be to resign to the consequences of nature/nurture was something I couldn’t allow if I could help it.
I make no claims to understand the totality of Lucy’s addictions or her pains, and we also see how badly she wanted to succeed, how strong and proud she was. Yet in so many stories it’s also easy to see how an easy way out doesn’t look as bad to someone who was dealt only bad cards for a lifetime.
I cannot compare my life to Lucy’s. But I hated that I too have walked into rooms of people and looked around to ask myself the same question Lucy did, and crowned myself with the same response. As have I’m guessing at least a few of you reading this.
East of Eden
And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.
– John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952)
The above quote was what drew me to the book a few weeks after reading Lucy’s book, reeling under what it meant for the future. [Once again, I think you would relate if you ever felt events in your life couldn’t have gone any other way, that they are direct consequences of your past].
There’s a scene in the story where Samuel asks his young boy, “Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? …Well, think about it. Maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.”
I couldn’t understand Lucy Grealy if I tried, but when I read the above lines, I wish Lee spoke with her if it might have helped even a little. Maybe it wouldn’t have.
The book has characters terrified of their own mean streaks, convinced they’re predestined to live a life of shame and guilt, that they have no choice in the matter. Later it answers its own question – You’re not castigated to a life of suffering, for if you’re allowed to carry it, you’re also allowed to leave it behind, thou mayest. Maybe then you do have free will, or at least some semblance of it.
So a new icecream flavor isn’t appealing because you seek comfort in the familiar. And if it comes down to one or the other, maybe you will choose a job over love or companionship over peace. Much of it is perhaps already written because you were raised a certain way*. But you don’t have to carry your suffering with you, nothing is imposed, maybe you just needed someone to tell you that. And just like that maybe you have broken the curse.
TL;DR Lucy Gealy’s autobiography, with all its amazing prose, was eye-opening. East of Eden helped me with the rest, and I’m grateful to both.
Here is a video interview of Lucy promoting her second book.
* reference to Alchemist’s maktub
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