The 'revolutionary' (David Mitchell), profoundly beautiful memoir about living as a vulnerable body that rewrites our understanding of disability, desire and family.
Jan Grue had just become a father when he inherited a stack of his childhood medical records. Following a diagnosis of spinal muscular atrophy at the age of three, the raft of doctors' notes, clinical descriptions and case histories defined his body as defective and his future as bleak and limited. They conjured a childhood nothing like the one he remembered, that failed to anticipate the life he lived now. I Live a Life Like Yours is Grue's beautiful, groundbreaking search for a literary language that could better tell his story.
Writing with clear-eyed wisdom and bracing frankness, Grue folds insights from art, film and literature into an expansive account of who he was expected to be, and who he became. If it is a story of frustration with negligent institutions and the pain of stigma, it is also a story of the potential of acceptance and the gift of family. Unflinching, yet always compassionate, I Live a Life Like Yours is a fierce and tender reckoning with what it means to live as a vulnerable body.
'Jan Grue's superb book encompasses memoir, ideas and travel. It up-ends received wisdom about disability. It testifies to an uncrushable spirit and an ordinary, extraordinary family. It is humbling, dark, bright, defiant, smart, generous and - in its courteous Norwegian way - revolutionary' - David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas
'A narrative that is compelling, unconventional and powerfully told... His genius becomes evident in his mastery of language.' - Michael J. Fox
