For psychotherapist, painter, feminist, filmmaker, writer, and disability activist Harilyn Rousso, hearing well-intentioned people tell her, "You're so inspirational!" is patronizing, not complimentary. In her empowering and at times confrontational memoir, Don't Call Me Inspirational, Rousso, who has cerebral palsy, describes overcoming the prejudice against disability--not overcoming disability. She addresses the often absurd and ignorant attitudes of strangers, friends, and family.  Rousso also examines her own prejudice toward her disabled body, and portrays the healing effects of intimacy and creativity, as well as her involvement with the disability rights community. She intimately reveals herself with honesty and humor and measures her personal growth as she goes from "passing" to embracing and claiming her disability as a source of pride, positive identity, and rebellion.

'Exile and Pride is a call to awareness, an exhortation for each of us to examine our connection to and alienation from our environment, our sexuality, and each other.' Kenny Fires, author of Body, Remember: A Memoir'Eli Clare's original work exploring the interstices between class, environmentalism, radical gender politics and disability consciousness moves beyond the false compartmentalisation that has characterised progressive politics in the nineties, and toward a viable radical politics for the twenty-first century.' Ynestra King, polio survivor, co-editor, Dangerous IntersectionsEli Clare, a lesbian with cerebral palsy, examines environmentalism, disability and gender, both personally and politically. In interconnected essays, Clare links her life to the rednecks and clearcuts she grew up among, the freak shows of the nineteenth century, and the transgender warriors of today. Her intelligence and wit shine through her ruminations on cerebral palsy, child abuse, and her love of nature, and the connections among the histories of disabled people, women, and gay/lesbian/bi/trans people.

The vividly told, gloriously illustrated memoir of an artist born with disabilities who searches for freedom and connection in a society afraid of strange bodies. What do we sacrifice in the pursuit of normalcy? And what becomes possible when we embrace monstrosity? Can we envision a world that sees impossible creatures? In 1958, amongst the children born with spina bifida is Riva Lehrer. At the time, most such children are not expected to survive. "Not your typical memoir about 'what it's like to be disabled in a non-disabled world' . . . Lehrer tells her stories about becoming the monster she was always meant to be: glorious, defiant, unbound, and voracious. Read it!"--Alice Wong, founder and director, Disability Visibility Project.

* A New York Times Editors' Choice * Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction Books of 2021 * I am not talking about surviving. I am not talking about becoming human, but about how I came to realize that I had always already been human. I am writing about all that I wanted to have, and how I got it. I am writing about what it cost, and how I was able to afford it. 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. Along the way, Grue moves effortlessly between his own story and those of others, incorporating reflections on philosophy, film, art, and the work of writers from Joan Didion to Michael Foucault.

Anand Prahlad was born on a former plantation in Virginia in 1954. This memoir, vividly internal, powerfully lyric, and brilliantly impressionistic, is his story.   For the first four years of his life, Prahlad didn't speak. But his silence didn't stop him from communicating--or communing--with the strange, numinous world he found around him. Ordinary household objects came to life; the spirits of long-dead slave children were his best friends. In his magical interior world, sensory experiences blurred, time disappeared, and memory was fluid. Ever so slowly, he emerged, learning to talk and evolving into an artist and educator. His journey takes readers across the United States during one of its most turbulent moments, and Prahlad experiences it all, from the heights of the Civil Rights Movement to West Coast hippie enclaves to a college town that continues to struggle with racism and its border state legacy.   Rooted in black folklore and cultural ambience, and offering new perspectives on autism and more, The Secret Life of a Black Aspie will inspire and delight readers and deepen our understanding of the marginal spaces of human existence.

Author, advocacy journalist, disability rights activist, feminist, and founder of Mouth magazine, Lucy Gwin (1943-2014) made her mark by helping those in "handicaptivity" find their voice. Gwin produced over one hundred issues of the magazine one of the most radical and significant disability rights publications and masterminded its acerbic, sometimes funny, and often moving articles about people from throughout the disability community.

With a voice as disarmingly bold, funny, and unsentimental as its author, a thoroughly unconventional memoir that shatters the myth of the tragic disabled life Harriet McBryde Johnson isn't sure, but she thinks one of her earliest memories was learning that she will die. The message came from a maudlin TV commercial for the Muscular Dystrophy Association that featured a boy who looked a lot like her. Then as now, Johnson tended to draw her own conclusions. In secret, she carried the knowledge of her mortality with her and tried to sort out what it meant.