As Seen on TV: Provocations
by Lucy GrealyBloomsburyUSA, 224 pp., $23.95
With a title like As Seen on TV: Provocations, it’s easy to mistake this new book of essays by Lucy Grealy as another diatribe against the medium. But television is only the starting point for Grealy’s musings. The subjects of her 15 essays range from learning the tango, the relationship with her twin sister and siblings, the imaginings launched by a yellow house on the side of the road, and yes, her experiences with television, following the publication of her acclaimed memoir.
Grealy’s earlier book, Autobiography of a Face, relays the painful treatment she received for bone cancer that destroyed half her face. She endured nearly 30 reconstructive surgeries, as well as breathtaking cruelty and unmasked horror from both children and adults. In Provocations, she returns to some of the experiences shared in her autobiography, but widens her lens.
Fortunately, Grealy never settles for platitudes. Instead, she ferrets through complex terrain, allowing the reader to take flight with her essays or merely digest them and move on to the next. She is not as interested in parading her pain so that some other soul can make some good come from it as she is in candidly sharing experiences or ideas that have shaped, wounded, or amused her. At the same time, Grealy is wonderfully unpretentious. She’s as likely to illustrate her point with examples from television sitcoms (The Addams Family, The Munsters) as she is with references to Lacan, Heidegger, or the King James version of the Bible.
Perhaps as a result of observing the world from a distance during her long illness, Grealy’s most compelling essays are those where she makes observations from the margins — even those events in which she plays a role. She directs her penetrating gaze from a variety of vantage points: learning tango from a handsome instructor she longs to seduce (“What It Takes”); the sexual ambiguity she cultivated as a young woman (“Nerve”); hanging out with New York drag queens (“The Girls”); and becoming a U.S. citizen when her sense of citizenship is, at best, smeared among three nations.
Deft, clever, and refreshingly accessible, Grealy’s Provocations is sure to please fans of her first book, and invite new readers unfamiliar with this exceptionally open-hearted writer.
This article appears in October 13 • 2000.