Dorothy Ellen Palmer - Falling for Myself

Dorothy Ellen Palmers Falling For Myself is a powerful call for a mass social justice movement that doesnt ignore Disability Justice. Through painfully honest and laugh-out-loud storytelling, Palmer delves deep into personal, genetic and societal memory, showing us that its possible to uncinch ourselves from the lies weve been told about ableism and disability. A moving, informative and magical read.
Farzana Doctor, author of All Inclusive

Dorothy Palmer spent a life trying to fit in to shoes, and with her classmates and colleagues. She was born with congenital anomalies in her feet, and while she tried to hide from what was wrong with her, she frequently fell. After a lifetime, Dorothy Palmer finally accepted herself as a disabled woman, and her need for mobility aids. Profound and engrossing, Falling for Myself details a strong womans search for herself and for disability acceptance across Canada.
Jane Eaton Hamilton, author of Weekend

Dorothy Ellen Palmer writes to channel shame into solidarity, anger into analysis, denial into delight and loss into love, and this book full of insight and wild humour, fierce activism and vital intersectional analysis marks her stellar success. She calls all of us to imagine a world beyond the limits of ableism and a movement where all of us have room to move.
Sonya Huber, author of Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System

At the very start of her memoir, Falling for Myself , Dorothy Palmer tells us that we may laugh. She writes, But as you chuckle, remember this: Funny fat women are always angry. Were taught to aim the punchline at ourselves and smile. Not this time. Fair warning. Palmers storytelling carries her sharp intelligence and sparkling humour throughout her reflections on a lonely childhood, living as a disabled woman in an ableist world and the costs of being an activist. This is not inspiration porn. Palmer also does not want or need the readers pity. We respect her too much for that. Instead, we are moved, entertained and provoked to examine ourselves. By telling us her stories, Palmer invites us to examine ours. Also, you will laugh and laugh.
Carrianne Leung, author of That Time I Loved You

This book reads like a map of exposed nerves. It is a raw, detailed rendering of a disabled womans life that, in the end, offers a beautifully discomforting and necessary gift of unapologetic, even gleeful defiance.
Adam Pottle, author of Voice: On Writing with Deafness

Look out, Canada, this memoir has the most fierce account of what it really means to be a disabled person that you are going to read, this year or any year. Whether shes destroying the myth of Tiny Tims cheerfulness or explaining why the word bastard should exit your vocabulary immediately, Dorothy Palmer looks squarely at injustice and refuses to let it define who she is.
Julie Rak, author of Boom!: Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market

If you care about social justice and equality, you must read Falling for Myself . In a searing memoir that is both moving and funny, Dorothy Palmer comes out of the closet as a disabled person and challenges all of us to bring down the walls from inaccessible spaces to ableist language that exclude and oppress huge numbers of people who are struggling against the ableism imposed by our culture and society.
Judy Rebick, author of Heroes in My Head

In her luminous memoir, Dorothy Palmer vividly renders in-depth reflections and examination of adoption, disability, the body, ableism and difficult knowledge. She untangles intricate knots which bind these to ideal femininity, race, place, heteronormativity and Canadian institutions of the White identity as a systemic buttress for the nation. Her nimble prose, enmeshed with sensitive wit firmly lodged in the critical consciousness of dissent and power, locates resistance through a purposeful examination of the disabled closet ... opened from the inside. A constant occupant within the closet are angst-ridden Canadian discourses and fears of nonconforming bodies, minds, imaginaries and understandings of what and who is centre and other; beauty and monstrous; seen and the abjected; rewarded and or subjected to punitive subjection; which bodies are deemed normal and which rendered feral and hyper-Other. Palmer skillfully navigates these affective layers of a Canadian WASP familial history in which the state plays a colossal role managing disability as pathology, confusion and shame, thereby naturalizing the reduction of disabled folx to Almost Human. That no body be left behind, for Palmer, is to demand that critical disability consciousness must address desire to not be deemed as heroic or brave, but radically ordinary and a disabled whole. Palmers struggle, epiphanies and revelations, storied through striking, clear prose, is a must-read primer for those seeking to engage Palmers real target of this story: ableism. To truly get at the root, one must look deeply at the family history level into how normative ideas of Canada, the nation, state and ableism actually weaponize and repress relevant knowledge which is situated and too often obscured between repressed desire, shame, adoption, disability, struggle, resistance and dissent.
Margo Tamez (Knits gokyaa dind | Big Water Peoples | enrolled Lipan Apache), author of Raven Eye (Willa Award)

ALSO BY DOROTHY ELLEN PALMER

When Fenelon Falls

Dedicated to the lives and living legacies of
Stella Young and Audre Lorde

Epigraph

and when we speak we are afraid

our words will not be heard

nor welcomed

but when we are silent

we are still afraid

So it is better to speak

remembering

we were never meant to survive.

AUDRE LORDE, A LITANY FOR SURVIVAL,
THE BLACK UNICORN

I am not a snowflake. I am not a sweet, infantilising symbol of the fragility of life.

I am a strong, fierce, flawed adult woman.

I plan to remain that way in life, and in death.

STELLA YOUNG, FACEBOOK

By Way of Introduction

My father raised stud guppies. Beautiful male fish with fantails like monarch butterflies. He bagged them up and pimped them out to other guppy enthusiasts, who paid a stud fee in hopes of their own handsome offspring. Father found his twelve-tank calling thanks to me. Hed originally purchased neon tetras and angelfish. But Id leaned too close, lost my balance, fallen into the tank and pulled plants, pink gravel, fish and the burbling little Diver Dan filter all onto the floor, where none survived. My mother spanked me. The next day, my father bought guppies.