Autobiographical narratives of illness and disability are influential in popular and medical discourses of illness and disability, in part because these narratives represent illness and disability within a sociocultural context, intersecting with other categories of difference. Clinicians can benefit patients through a critical understanding of the formal and social conventions that shape illness and disability narratives and the effect these conventions can have on the lived experience of illness and disability. I analyze the 2003 edition of Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face to illustrate these socio-narrative conventions, especially in light of an afterword that significantly revises the ending to Grealy's narrative. I explore the parallels between narrative conventions-such as the "recovery narrative"-and caregivers' expectations that shape the role of the "good patient," as well as the resistance to conventions of closure, represented by the "renegotiated ending."