Alyssa Sheinmel on Writing About Face Transplants in Faceless

When Faceless’s main character, Maisie, is first given the chance to have a face transplant following a devastating accident, she thinks it’s some kind of joke. A face transplant can’t be a real thing, she thinks. It sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, a horror story, a mad scientist’s experiment.
And, I have to admit, when I first heard of face transplants, my reaction wasn’t all that different. Before I began researching and writing Faceless, I didn’t know anything about these procedures—I hadn’t even really heard of them. But when my editor shared an article from the New Yorker about face transplants with me, I was immediately fascinated by the science and technology that made these procedures possible.
The truth is, this book began long before I read that article. A few years ago I began drafting some notes for another book idea, the story of a girl who’d been in an accident that changed her face forever, who would struggle to discover how much of who she was was tied to what she looked like. Soon, I had pages of notes tucked away in the “Ideas” folder on my computer. A few years passed, and I kept coming back to this idea, kept typing up more notes—but I was never quite ready to start writing. It wasn’t until I learned about face transplants that I knew how I wanted to tell this girl’s story.
But I was met with some pretty weird reactions every time I answered the question, “What are you working on right now?” (It’s a question writers are asked pretty much every day.) When I answered that I was working on a book about a girl who has a face transplant, half my friends assumed I was working on a fantasy novel, or at the very least, taking some pretty big liberties with reality. Even some of the doctors I reached out to when I began my research had no idea what I was talking about! Everyone seemed to think this idea was kind of crazy. And, almost everyone asked me if I was worried that readers wouldn’t be able to relate to my main character, Maisie.
I always answered no. Because while Maisie’s experience in Faceless may be singular, not looking the way you think you should unfortunately isn’t.
How many of us look in the mirror and are occasionally disappointed, surprised (if not just plain shocked once in a while) by the sight of our reflections? Sometimes it’s just a bad haircut or an outfit that looked different inside the store, but the result is the same in the end. We see our reflections and think: That’s not what I thought I looked like.
Of course, even though it may start with how we look, it rarely ends there. You never fit in with the cool kids. Your parents don’t understand you. You said something you didn’t mean. The one thing that’s universal is the wrongness of it. It feels like you were born to the wrong parents, in the wrong town, in the wrong skin.
Maisie spends much of Faceless trying to figure out who she is with this new face, in this new body—but at the end of the novel, she realizes her personality is so much more than a list of attributes. She would have changed even if she’d never been in her accident. She will continue to change for the rest of her life, just like everyone else will.
All of which is my very long-winded way of saying it was always easy for me to tell anyone who asked that I never really worried whether readers would be able to relate to Maisie. After all, if the one constant in life is change, then change is the one thing that all of us can relate to, right?
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