Disabilities

[worldstosee]

This time around I'm looking for recommendations for books by authors with disabilities / characters with disabilities. In the case of characters - please try to only recommend a book if you really know for sure that the disability is portrayed well/accurately. Thank you.

Comments

[trouble]

You may want to check out this interview with Mari Ness. I know she has a disability, and she talks about it a bit in the interview. I am, admittedly, not familiar with her work.

[worldstosee]

Thank you for the rec, and the post to disability! Over on my main review blog - Multi-Genre Fan - I made a post about doing a reading challenge for authors with disabilities Similar to the reading challenges for authors of color.I don't know if you want to announce the post on disability as well?

[sixbeforelunch]

Are you familiar with the Vorkosigan saga? The main character, Miles Vorkosigan, was exposed to a toxin before he was born, and the result is that his bones are very brittle. I don't know if I can say it's accurate, since the toxin was made up and the effects were at the author's discretion, but with the caveat that I am a physically abled person and have no personal experience with the matter, I thought it was very well done.

[worldstosee]

Thank you for the rec. Someone mentioned that series a while back when I was asking a similar question (different forum) but I never got around to reading it then. I should check that one out some time.

[dilate_andrea]

You should read:

"The body silent" by Robert Murphy - he was a professor in anthropology at Colombia and the book is about how his life went on from the day he was diagnosed.

[worldstosee]

Thank you!

[dilate_andrea]

No problem!

[jesse_the_k]

There are thousands that meet those requirements, so I'll fling some from my "even when I give away everything to the library, I keep these" shelf:

Skallagrigg, William Horwood. Near-future, horror, family saga. Hero is brilliant computer programmer with CP; she discovers the source of a legendary protector of prisoners of British warehouses for disabled people.

Getting Life, by Julie Cole. Present day, naturalistic fiction. Central character is woman in an American nursing home, learning how to advocate for herself and how to work with other disabled people to create an independent life.

Over my head: a doctor's own story of head injury from the inside looking out, by Claudia L Osborn. This memoir naturally combines medical details and everyday life, and is highly informative.

Anything and everything by Georgina Kleege. She's a literary theorist who writes like a human being, meditating on the literal and metaphorical meanings which "vision" and "sight" play in our society. She's blind, and she's particularly insightful on why Helen Keller's pacifist, feminist and socialist politics were distorted into a HALLMARK card.

Moving Violations: Wheelchairs, War Zones and Declarations of Independence is a very funny look at the first 15 years of journalist John Hockenberry's career. And love life, battles with taxicab drivers, and trips into Kurdistan atop donkeys. Insights into: why American war correspondents' reports rarely address life on the home front; the disability hierarchy ("there's nothing wrong with my brain!"); the half-hearted worse-than-nothing disability accommodations offered by nominally liberal NPR; and much much much more.

There's a start!

[worldstosee]

Thank you for the recs!

[pandorasblog]

I've bookmarked this thread and will look forward to checking out peoples' recommendations. Do you intend people to add to it over time/to have it perma-linked somewhere as a resource? If so, I'll come back when I've tried a couple more books on my shelf, as I won't recommend them without having read them and found out how good the portrayals are.

Some recs:

A Different Life by Lois Keith. It's about a teenage girl who becomes disabled, and I identified with this so much in my own teenage years. It's very realistic about hospital experiences, emotional ups and downs, the way that peoples' reactions can be surprising in both good and bad ways, and the issue of access in schools.

The Spiral Cage by Al Davison is an autobiography in the comics medium, about the author's experience of spina bifida. It's a bit 'bitty' because it's less a single ongoing story and more a collection of reflections and experiences which had (as I understand it) previously been published separately. But it's interesting nonetheless. I should mention there's some nudity - not because I have any problem with that, but because I know that some people who are not habitual buyers of comics for adult readers may be surprised. For myself, I admire the frankness of the author/artist, particularly in a culture which would rather hide the bodies of disabled people.

[worldstosee]

Thanks for the recs!

Do you intend people to add to it over time/to have it perma-linked somewhere as a resource?

That's a good idea - linking it and using it as a reference. I posted this question because I'm considering doing a reading challenge for authors with disabilities (similar to the challenges for reading more books by authors of color). I made a post about the idea on my review blog, but haven't gotten far with the idea yet.

[livrelibre]

There's Nancy Mairs' Waist-High in the World, which I haven't read but I've heard good things about.