These disability memoirs confront ableism and champion accessibility

Up until her death in early 2023, Judith “Judy” Heumann was an advocate at the very forefront of the movement demanding equity for disabled folks. In fact, her impassioned activism was so impactful that Heumann was recognized internationally, earning the title of “The Mother of the Disabled Rights Movement.” In her memoir, Being Heumann, she retraces her journey from her upbringing in Brooklyn as a polio survivor to her experiences as a wheelchair user to her tireless work in the nation’s capitol, all while motivating listeners to continue the fight for inclusion and visibility. Heumann’s memoir is stirringly performed by Tony Award winner Ali Stroker, who, in 2015, made history by becoming the first actor using a wheelchair to appear on a Broadway stage.

Millions of Americans, including National Book Award-winning scholar Imani Perry, face each day through the lens of chronic illness. In her absolute stunner of a memoir, Perry details her experience living with systemic lupus and the agonies of navigating a culture that so often fails to accommodate or even acknowledge those living with invisible disabilities. Her brilliant grasp of language coupled with her gentle, measured performance lay bare the frustrating reality of sickness. “In living with disease,” Perry writes, “we bear witness to something important about the human condition, something that is worth the world’s attention.” Now, it’s up to us to listen.

A finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize, Andrew Leland’s The Country of the Blind is a tremendously thoughtful, moving portrait of the author’s journey with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative vision condition that will eventually claim his sight. Now at the midway point of his life, Leland has lost a great deal of his sight and knows that life with blindness will soon be his reality. And so he begins to prepare, exploring the landscape of disability culture and customs, a new language and assistive tech, and advocacy groups—all with an open-minded humility and openhearted curiosity. Leland blends his story of personal discovery and burgeoning identity with a thorough look at the history of blindness and blind culture as well as the future just on the horizon.

Activist Alice Wong is the founder of the Disability Visibility Project, a digital storytelling community intended to amplify the voices of folks with disabilities, sharing art, interviews, and media through the multifaceted lens of disability culture. Wong gathered such personal works in her collections Disability Visibility and Disability Intimacy, but in 2022’s Year of the Tiger, the story she shares is all her own. In this memoir, Wong brilliantly wields a variety of mediums—from conversations to commissioned art and everything in between—to craft a scrapbook of sorts, creating a recollection of her life, her work, and her hopes for the future that sears with its wit and sparkles with its creativity, all the while ignited by fury.

With the sense of isolation so many encounter after a disability diagnosis, narratives on navigating the labyrinthine health care landscape and rebuilding a life after facing the unfathomable are essential. John Cotter’s staggering testament exemplifies such significant storytelling while offering heart and soul all its own. Both a gutting, intimate reflection on the reality of life with a chronic illness (in Cotter’s case, what’s diagnosed as Ménière’s disease) and an exceptional account of the human capacity for resilience, Cotter’s melodious author-narrated memoir is as much about gradually losing one sensorial experience as it is finding a better understanding of the self.

Writer and journalist Chloé Cooper Jones was born with sacral agenesis, a rare congenital condition that affects the development of the lower vertebrae, leading to pain and differences in gait and stature. Cooper Jones unearths the everyday realities of life with a visible disability in Easy Beauty, her intensely vulnerable memoir that glimpses the ways in which she has been both perceived and ignored, facing either discrimination or a total lack of visibility. As she works against all expectations and preconceived notions, taking up space in a liberating reclamation of the self, Cooper Jones experiences motherhood, treks from landscapes as vibrant and varied as California and Cambodia, and meditates on cultural mythology surrounding appearance and assessed worthiness. Powerfully narrated in the author’s own voice, this contemplative memoir inspires introspection and upends faulty standards of beauty and desirability.

South African disability rights advocate Eddie Ndopu has long been a vocal proponent for equity, accessibility, and inclusion internationally. Now, in Sipping Dom Perignon Through a Straw, Ndopu looks back on his own life thus far—one self-described as “profoundly disabled and profoundly successful”. Born with a rare degenerative motor neuron disease called spinal muscular atrophy, Ndopu was initially told he wouldn’t make it past early childhood. Now 33, he’s made a career out of defying the odds. Despite his many successes in academia and beyond, Ndopu still recalls the extreme alienation that accompanied being the sole disabled voice in meaningful spaces, and the pressures of balancing the desire to achieve with a lack of resources and support. A thorough and triumphant rejection of ableism, this memoir is a testament to the strength of spirit needed to thrive when the cards are systemically stacked against you.

Always poignant and at times uproariously funny, Greg Marshall’s recollection of a life lived at the intersection of disability and queerness is essential listening. During his childhood, his parents told him that his limp was due to tight tendons in his leg. By adulthood, Marshall would learn that he had actually been born with cerebral palsy, a disability hidden from him throughout his life. Reflecting on this undisclosed disability, his mother’s battle with cancer and his father’s with ALS, and his budding sexuality against the backdrop of less-than-permissive 1990s Utah, he wields wit and heart in equal measure to paint a portrait of a totally singular coming of age. Marshall is deeply compassionate in sketching his family, self-effacing and open in discussing his explorations of gay sex and desire and of existing freely and boldly in a world inharmonious with your very existence.

In Lucky Girl, decorated Paralympian Scout Bassett embraces the complete story of her life, from the chemical fire that took her right leg when she was only an infant to the difficulties of acclimating to a vastly new life after being adopted from an orphanage in Nanjing and moving to the United States at seven years old. Bassett shares her wisdom with listeners about all that she's learned in the years since, reflecting on her past with vulnerability, gratitude, and grace while also acknowledging just how difficult it was to survive and succeed with the odds firmly stacked against her as a disabled woman of color in the United States. If you’ve ever felt lonely, burdened by expectation, or simply as if you don’t quite belong, Bassett’s warm memoir is a reassuring reminder that there is no wrong way to exist.

Author, journalist, and disability rights activist Keah Brown went viral in 2017 when she shared a post using the hashtag #DisabledAndCute, a trend celebrating the bodies of disabled folks, encouraging a wave of self-love and body positivity within the community. As gorgeous, grinning faces flooded social media in response, Brown emphasized the truth: that, despite faulty assumptions of allure, attractiveness, and lovability, those living with a disability are just as worthy of recognition for their physical appearance. In The Pretty One, Brown shares essays on life as a Black woman with cerebral palsy, chronicling her own perspective shift from one envious of “normalcy” to a total embrace of her identity and her own distinctive loveliness. And her narration brings something gorgeous all its own, a wholehearted, down-to-earth delivery that connects with the listener from the very first word.

Shane Burcaw and his now-wife Hannah have been a fixture in the disability-focused social media space for years with their popular vlog channel, Squirmy and Grubs. There, the interabled couple (Shane lives with spinal muscular atrophy while Hannah is non-disabled) share stories from their relationship and allow viewers a glimpse at the realities of their day-to-day—from the search for a suitable wheelchair and accessible spaces to the realities of attempting to conceive via IVF to those silly, everyday joys of living alongside the person you love most. Burcaw’s signature sense of humor is on full display in his 2019 memoir. Strangers Assume My Girlfriend is My Nurse skewers those most awkward, patronizing moments of life with a disability, instead underscoring just how full and radiant life can be even as the world refuses to make space for you.

The title of this fiercely funny Audible Original comes from a naysaying choreographer who dismissively suggested that actress and comedian Maysoon Zayid pursue another career. Undeterred, Zayid forged ahead anyway. Find Another Dream unearths her path toward stardom, from coming of age as the daughter of Muslim Palestinian immigrants in New Jersey to daily life with cerebral palsy to the glory of a sold-out stand-up stage. Alive with light, love, and levity, this listen brims with the splendor of success, the road bumps of small failures, and the wonder of dogged determination in the face of it all. And there’s no one better suited for performing it than Zayid herself, who infuses her recollections with impeccable comedic timing and no shortage of charisma.

Growing up in the 1990s and 2000s, Rebekah Taussig only saw cultural depictions of disability in ways that relied heavily on exploitative stereotype, all told from a non-disabled perspective on a sliding scale that ranged from grotesque to mawkish. As a paralyzed wheelchair user, such an ableist, narrow viewpoint never sat right with her, and so she sought to write and share her own story—one as resonant as it is authentic—so audiences could better understand the reality of life with a disability. In this author-narrated collection of essays, Taussig emphasizes the need for a more complex and nuanced view of disability, while advocating for a less exclusionary world.

Soundtrack of Silence brilliantly illuminates the shifting rhythms of hearing loss and auditory disability, all the while appealing to the universal love language of music. Listeners are encouraged to cozy up with the songs that have influenced their own lives as they follow along on Hay’s emotional journey, offering an exercise in empathy that strikes a heartfelt chord. Hay narrates his memoir himself, a testament to his commitment to accessibility and equal opportunity for deaf folks and to the power of his own singular voice.

Many health advocates have posited that as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent boom in cases of chronic, long-term illness following infection, our nation is approaching a future where a majority of the population may be living with a disability. If that reality is just around the corner, social activist, poet, and writer Leah Laksmi Piepzna-Samarasinha reassures listeners that perhaps that possibility brings us all collectively closer to liberation and survival. Blending the thoughtful intimacy of a memoir with the galvanizing energy of social sciences nonfic, Piepzna-Samarasinha’s The Future Is Disabled is a valuable collection for disabled folks, a listen as full of applicable, care-work-guided expertise as it is a heartfelt celebration of identity, community, survival, and unbridled joy.