Autobiography of a Face

This book is Lucy Grealy's memoir (PB GRE) of being treated for a cancer that left her face disfigured and then enduring 15 years of further treatment "for nothing other than looking different from everyone else." As a child, her response was naive:

"I told my teacher and all of my friends, probably with pride: I had a malignancy, I was going to have a big operation now.
Some years later, I don't remember exactly how many, as my family was milling about the kitchen and I was leafing through the paper at the table, someone dated an event as something that had happened 'before Lucy had cancer.' Shocked, I looked up.
'I had cancer?'
'Of course you did, fool, what did you think you had?'
'I thought I had a Ewing's sarcoma.'
'And what on earth do you think that is?'
My family seemed rather incredulous, but it was true. In all that time, not one person ever said the word cancer to me, at least not in a way that registered as pertaining to me."

I think the image on the cover of the book is more evocative than a graphically realistic photograph: