Disability Memoir

Helen Adams Keller was an American author, handicap rights champ, political activist, and speaker who lived from June 27, 1880 to June 1, 1968. She was born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, and following a bout of health problem at the age of 19 months, she lost both her sight and hearing. Keller used home signals till she was seven years of age, when she met Anne Sullivan, her first instructor and long-lasting partner, who taught her language, and that includes reading and writing.

There Plant Eyes probes the ways in which blindness has shaped our ocularcentric culture, challenging deeply ingrained ideas about what it means to be “blind”. For millennia, blind­ness has been used to signify such things as thoughtlessness (“blind faith”), irrationality (“blind rage”), and unconsciousness (“blind evolution”). But at the same time, blind people have been othered as the recipients of special powers as compensation for lost sight (from the poetic gifts of John Milton to the heightened senses of the comic book hero Daredevil).

What would you have left if you awoke and were told you would be paralyzed from the eyes down for the rest of your life? After an almost fatal car crash and a botched surgery to repair nerve damage, that was Clay Byars' reality at 18 years old. Determination became the only constant in his life from that point on, and miraculously he quickly began to defy the odds. Clay discovered a life far different from that of his identical twin brother, Will.

Liz Casper is a former medical doctor, artist, and author from the Pacific Northwest. In her first book, BRILLIANT, BEAUTIFUL, BIPOLAR, Liz shares with us her personal journey before, during, and after her diagnosis of bipolar disorder. The book, set in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, chronicles Liz’s experience both living with and healing from this devastating diagnosis.

A profoundly beautiful memoir about disability, difference, and living as a vulnerable body. Jan Grue had just become a father when he inherited a stack of his childhood medical records. Following a diagnosis of spinal muscular atrophy at the age of three, the raft of doctors' notes, clinical descriptions and case histories defined his body as defective and his future as bleak and limited. They conjured a childhood nothing like the one he remembered, that failed to anticipate the life he lived now. "I Live a Life Like Yours" is Grue's beautiful, groundbreaking search for a literary language that could better tell his story.

In the fall of 1988, Sue Miller found herself caring for her father as he slipped into the grasp of Alzheimer's disease. She was, she claims, perhaps the least constitutionally suited of all her siblings to be in the role in which she suddenly found herself, and in The Story of My Father she grapples with the haunting memories of those final months and the larger narrative of her father's life.

Jan Grue was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy at the age of three. Shifting between specific periods of his life - his youth with his parents and sister in Norway; his years of study in Berkeley, St. Petersburg, and Amsterdam; and his current life as a professor, husband, and father - he intersperses these histories with elegant, astonishingly wise reflections on the world, social structures, disability, loss, relationships, and the body: in short, on what it means to be human.

In Raising Eddie, Paul Christodoulou delivers a brutally honest and deeply personal account of parenting a child with severe disabilities. This isn’t the story of a polished hero—it’s the journey of a flawed father wrestling with anger, despair, guilt, and ultimately, unwavering purpose. Paul opens the door to a life few dare to speak about: the sleepless nights, the quiet rage at an unforgiving disease, and the thoughts no parent wants to admit. But he doesn’t just tell his story—he fights. And he challenges you to fight alongside him.

Born into a Christian family, author Bill Brack learned the importance of serving the Lord early on. He built his character even further by joining the Marines and serving his country during the Vietnam war years. But everything changed when he suffered a diving accident and found himself completely paralyzed. A long process of healing and restoration began, during which he drew upon his faith to rediscover the joy of living.

Whether you’re facing your own hip replacement surgery or want to train for something like a triathlon, or you simply find yourself facing extreme challenges in your own life, this book is your guide to putting steel in your bones and doing what you may never have thought was possible.

This English professor grew up spacey and overweight. Drowning in the unrealistic demands of motherhood, Livingston steals her son's ADHD medication and watches it transform her life—for good and bad. She grows weary of subjective diagnoses and chemical treatments from traditional psychology experts, and experiments with functional medicine—brain mapping and nutritional supplements—as a way to understand her brain's potential, bio-hacking her way to a healthy body and mind.

When Pepper Stetler was told that her daughter who has Down Syndrome would be regularly required to take IQ tests to secure support in school, she asked a simple question: why? In questioning the authority and relevance of the test, Stetler sets herself on a winding investigation into how the IQ test came to be the irrefutable standard for measuring intelligence. The unsettling history causes Stetler to wonder what influence this test will have over her daughter's future and whether Louisa should be taking it at all.

A collision with a moose on a dark highway left Susan Mockler with an incomplete spinal injury, suddenly compromising her ability to walk and to care for herself. She spent months in a rehabilitation facility learning how to adjust to her new reality, and though her body partially recovered, every aspect of her life changed.

This program is read by the author. An inspiring memoir of a young man who discovered he was going completely deaf just at the moment he’d fallen in love for the first time. As a child, Matt Hay didn’t know his hearing wasn’t the way everyone else processed sound—because of the...

There Are No Answers Here, Only Questions is the true story of two life-altering events and the personal transformation that resulted from their unlikely collision. It's the story of an owner preparing to sell his business and retire just as he is diagnosed with cancer.

As a boy, severely disabled after contracting polio as a baby in working class Liverpool, Bert Massie found himself wondering why disabled people were expected to adapt to the world around them, and not the other way round. In his teens, he began to campaign for rights for disabled people, and having battled his way through prejudice and the education system to become a Bachelor of Arts and a qualified social worker, he became a prominent figure in the fight for fair treatment for disabled people leading to the ground breaking Disability Discrimination Act.

We think of Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of the telephone, but that’s not how he saw his own career. As the son of a deaf woman and, later, husband to another, his goal in life from adolescence was to teach deaf students to speak. Even his tinkering sprang from his teaching work; the telephone had its origins as a speech reading machine. The Invention of Miracles takes a new look at an American icon, revealing the astonishing true genesis of the telephone and its connection to another, far more disturbing legacy of Bell’s.

In 1959, the year Terry Galloway turned nine, the voices of everyone she loved began to disappear. No one yet knew that an experimental antibiotic given to her mother had wreaked havoc on her fetal nervous system, eventually causing her to go deaf. As a self-proclaimed "child freak," she acted out her fury with her boxy hearing aids and Coke-bottle glasses by faking her own drowning at a camp for crippled children

Ruth's tribe are her lively children and her filmmaker husband, Simon, who has motor neurone disease and can communicate only with his eyes. Ruth's other tribe are the friends who gather at the cove in Greystones, Co. Wicklow, and regularly throw themselves into the freezing cold water just for kicks. The Tragic Wives' Swimming Club, as they jokingly call themselves, meet to cope with the extreme challenges life puts in their way, not to mention the monster waves rolling over the horizon.

In 1959, at the age of 21, Max Starkloff was in a car accident that left him paralyzed from the neck down. His doctors doubted he would live longer than a few days, and, if he survived, the hope for his quality of life would be minimal. How did this young man with barely a high school education become the leader of a powerful disability rights movement and the founder of the Starkloff Disability Institute? This is his remarkable story.