| pher, for she simultaneously authenticates a past shared with others (writes, that is, a memoir) while performing as her present authorial self (and so constructs a confession). The result is a social and psychological document of permanent value to any reader alive to the range and diversity of contemporary American experience and expression. |
| Some readers, though, may welcome this woman's singular story because they believe it is almost unique, that few disabled Americans have actually written memorable autobiographies. Compared to other marginalized. persons and groups, this is so. Social and economic formations controlling the writing, publication, and reception of books have often worked to limit accounts about people who are blind or who have serious disabilities, just as significant numbers of minorities, women, gays and lesbians, prisoners, exiles, and others on the edges have only recently found voices and venues for telling their own intimate stories. |
| But the relative rarity of Journey into Personhood is only partly true. Many readers will remember from schooldays Helen Keller's remarkable memoir, The Story of My Life, if not that classic's several sequels. Between 1903 and 1994, there appeared more than a few valuable personal histories about being disabled or afflicted mentally and physically. As the bibliographies of Louis Kaplan and Patricia Addis attest, most of these autobiographies deal with blindness, deafness, cancer, tuberculosis, or polio. Cerebral palsy, with its usual origin in birth injury and its outward manifestations in severe muscular dysfunction, especially spastic movements, blurred speech, and often lifelong use of a wheelchair, is a condition not much welcomed by the reading public. None of those who have cerebral palsy, after all, can report a cure or even a radical cessation of symptoms, though all such narratives may demonstrate that people with cerebral palsy possess brains and creative imaginations. Grace Hoopes's |
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