📗 "Growing Up Disabled in Australia" edited by Carly Findlay
This is an anthology with more than 40 contributors! There's mostly memoir-esque essays, but also some poems, letters and even a comic.
I was pleasantly surprised by the diversity of the collection. Some of the topics discussed are MS, EDS, blindness, deafness, ME/cfs, cystic fibrosis, cerebral palsy, autism, ADHD, and many more. The social model of disability is the general approach for most of these, and there's room for all disability, chronic illness and neurodiversity, no matter if the person themselves or only society regards it as a negative or not.
Because there's a range of ages, you're just as likely to read about a very recent school experience as a post-war polio treatment for children. There's views into (the problems with) special education and institutionalization of people with intellectual/learning disabilities. Happy childhoods and traumatic youth memories all come to pass. Racism against Aboriginal peoples, sexism in healthcare, discrimination in public spaces... Some chapters were extremely relatable for me, some were completely new impressions. Parts of this are of course very Australia-specific, but a lot is universal too.
I think this anthology has a good balance. Like any big collection, the quality of writing varies quite a bit. But that didn't stop me from appreciating the contributions. Some made me cry, while other made me laugh out loud. I wish every country had a book like this, I'd definitely want one for my own country of birth.
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