Cool Lucy Summary

Lucy wrote about her long struggle with identifying who she was and coming to terms with herself, even though she physically fought with cancer her battle afterwards with her identity was the real challenge and lasted much throughout her life. She did come to terms with herself later in life but after a long battle of fighting with her identity and even after her surgeries not feeling whole with who she truly was.

She especially fought with the idea of her identity in the chapter “Cool” throughout it is her making new friends, experimenting with sex and finding love and beauty in different aspects of life. This is to help her along her long journey of becoming who she wants to be and the life she wishes to lead. This also helps her feel

whole in a world where she feels she has been rejected from since the beginning. This chapter is also about a long life of over 30 surgeries to get rid of this stigma she was marked with.

“I now possessed a large number of varied and decidedly wonderful friends, whom I valued immeasurably.

Through them I discovered what it was to love people. There was an art to it, I discovered, which was not really all that different from the love that is necessary in the making of art.”(p. 195)

Lucy tells us how friends helped her come to terms with herself and shape her identity throughout this chapter, telling us how in the aforementioned quote that “There was an art to it.” A beautiful summary of how the interlinkings of love and your art are needed to make beautiful art and how it connects to how love and identity in life are essentially art that we ourselves the painters must paint with our friends and loved ones and decisions and everything we do in life to create the beautiful self-portrait of our lives.

She later goes on to make a new friend named Greg who is a newly open homosexual and goes to a gay club and dances with him and takes note of “what it is like to act sexually in the world”(P. 202) and then later goes on to become friends with a grouble of transvestites and again helps her gain another view of the world to continually shape her identity and her sense of beauty and love in the world through many different

eyes.

The chapter “Cool’ on the surface is about her making new friends and seeing the world after and between surgeries but on a deeper level it is about her shaping of what is cool in the world and how objective the world “cool” is. She comes in better terms with herself and her identity through many different friend groups and their different views on beauty and love. Through these many different views and ways of thinking she stumbles her way to her own identity after this long journey and sees herself the way an artist would see his art. How the artist has angst and love for his art but still paints the portrait, she will still paint her self-portrait of life through the angst and love and the many different things life throws at you, she will still stride forward through it to finish that painting. This is her identity and she will own it.