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

[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!