The Right Way to be Crippled and Naked

“Disability can be difficult to look at. Disfigurements ... can be unsettling in their strangeness, their out-in-the-open vulnerability. But rather than ignore it wilfully, the protagonist in “The Sitting” is forced - with her meticulous artist's gaze - to stare directly at what she's been conditioned not to, and to treat the disabled body as aesthetically valuable. And what she finds is that bodily difference is worth viewing - and worth viewing closely. It is sublime, and intimate, and deeply human. In a way, it is art.” - Megan Granata, afterword to “The Sitting”

I've been participating in the Read Harder challenge for the last two years. I love that the challenge has encouraged me to read more women authors and more authors of color, and read more often about experiences that different than my own. But what I realized a few months ago is that, for all the reading-other-peoples'-experiences thing, there really hasn't been a whole lot of emphasis on authors or characters with disabilities (though, to give credit where it is due, one of last year's challenge tasks was to read a book whose main character had a mental illness).

Upon having this realization, I went in search of books about disability in general, because to be perfectly honest, I was not entirely sure what all was included under the umbrella of disability. I am thankful I had the opportunity to read this anthology of stories, and that the author of each short story wrote an afterword to follow about why their piece was meaningful to them and how it came into creation. Some authors wrote stories similar to their own experiences, while others made up stories that were only somewhat related - or completely unrelated to - their own disabilities (or the disabilities of loved ones or figures in history).

It's sometimes hard to review collections of stories by different authors, but ultimately, I thought this was excellent. While I did not love every story, most were so wonderfully told, absolutely breathtaking. These stories covered such a broad range of topics: facial and body deformities (as mentioned in the quote above, one of my favorite stories, “The Sitting”), blindness, dementia, mental illness, diabetes and kidney failure (ohhh, “Bombshell Noel” by Thom Jones was so, so good, and so, so hard for me to read), birth defects, quadriplegia, deafness, recovery after a stroke (another favorite, “please, thank you” by Dagberto Gilb) and more and more. So many different perspectives.

I'm really glad I read this one, and I'd highly recommend.