By Greg Marshall
I’m writing from the banks of Barton Springs on what promises to be one of the hottest days of the year. I come here some mornings to remind myself that I have a body, and to take it on a little adventure, albeit one in which I take every precaution: ear plugs and goggles, more head-above-water breaststroke than freestyle, even when I’m inching east toward the skyscrapers of downtown and into the rising sun, like some kind of disabled Icarus, so chilled by the sixty-eight-degree water I often forget to kick.
I call myself the Crooked Swimmer. In spite of a childhood spent in Speedos struggling through kick-boarding drills on the local swim team, I’ve never managed to move in a straight line in the water. My left side is stronger than my right because of mild cerebral palsy, but asymmetry has its advantages: The Crooked Swimmer always finds the edge of the pool.
In addition to being swimming and tubing season in Texas, it’s also that time of summer when one Pride month gives way to another. July is Disability Pride Month. The internet tells me Disability Pride is celebrated in July because that’s when—in 1990, when I was five years old—the Americans with Disabilities Act became law. It’s our chance to pay homage to the “history, achievements, experiences, and struggles of the disability community,” according to The Arc, a non-profit organization that advocates for people living with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
If my recitation of the simple fact of Disability Pride sounds labored, it’s because the celebration, even the expression, is new to me. As a gay man who has been out of the closet for almost half my life, I’ve celebrated Gay Pride in one way or another for years, and the leap to Disability Pride feels as natural as the progression from one month to the next.
I’m hardly an expert when it comes to politics or social change, but it seems to me that one of the successes of the queer movement of the last ten or fifteen years is visibility. It’s harder to discriminate against people you know: friends, family, co-workers. Pride is everywhere, even in corporate offices, because queer people, like disabled people, are everywhere. Wonderfully enough, the same can be said for books about disability. With BookPeople’s blessing, I wanted to take the chance to highlight a few of my recent favorites. And when in doubt, of course, come into the store and talk to a real expert: a bookseller.
By Ryan O’Connell
In this sidesplitting and seductive debut novel, Ryan O’Connell chronicles the misadventures of a successful TV writer with cerebral palsy who can’t stop cheating on his boyfriend with sex workers. A fan of Ryan’s groundbreaking Netflix show Special, I found a renewed sense of agency over my own body in the pages of Just by Looking at Him. As I note in an interview I did with Ryan for LitHub, the novel is full of deft observations that only a writer with CP could make, but don’t get it twisted: this is the perfect beach read for anyone looking for an incisive and fresh comedy of errors. I give it five legs out of five.
By Elizabeth McCracken
I’d be remiss to mention Barton Springs without paying homage to the queen of morning swim, Elizabeth McCracken. In her latest novel, McCracken, who was one of my professors at the Michener Center for Writers, takes us on a walkabout around London. An unnamed narrator observes the city as she recalls her extraordinary, complicated mother, who has cerebral palsy. I read this novel on a family trip to Palm Springs, around my own extraordinary and complicated mother. My husband grew up in the same Massachusetts town as McCracken and her narrator, and he provided what folks in the newspaper business used to call local color. Poolside. This tender and exquisitely written book is a literary gem. Give this woman the Nobel already, please and thank you.
By Chloé Cooper Jones
A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Easy Beauty marks the arrival of a titanic literary talent. It’s a globetrotting philosophical treatise that is, somewhat paradoxically, a page turner that takes travel-hungry readers from Rome to Venice, Lake Como, and Milan. Chloé was born with a rare congenital disorder that means her body has been “visually marked by difference” since birth. Easy Beauty is a dazzling exploration of that difference, a book that unflinchingly plumbs the paradoxes of dark tourism in Cambodia, the “blunt, triumphant” but ultimately redeeming spectacle of a Beyoncé concert in Milan and the ableist under- and overtones at a Sundance party where she shares a moment of bodily communion with actor Peter Dinklage. Want more? Here’s a conversation I had with Chloe when her book came out last year. The paperback is available now and it’s gorgeous.
Life on Delay: Making Peace with a Stutter
By John Hendrickson
You’ve probably read John Hendrickson’s inimitable journalistic work even if you don’t recall his name: During the 2020 presidential race, John wrote a story for The Atlantic about Joe Biden’s stutter. Himself a lifelong stutterer, Hendrickson tackles tricky family dynamics and the difficulty of working as a reporter with a disability. I loved the specificity and verve with which Hendrickson captures the tumultuous music and media scene of the early 2010s but what really won me over was the way Hendrickson finds himself changed, if not transformed, by love. It’s rare to find a book that weaves together journalism and memoir seamlessly, but John Hendrickson’s Life on Delay does just that. A memoir filled with compassion and deep thought.
Thank you so much to Greg Marshall for sharing his thoughts and recommendations with us to celebrate Disability Pride Month! We were delighted to notice all of his recommendations were for authors we’ve hosted recently and included photos from those events. Were any of y’all at one of these featured events?
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