Reviewed by A.C. Riffer
Gaelynn Lea’s It Wasn’t Meant to Be Perfect: A Memoir is a warm, generous, and deeply vibrant account of a life shaped by music, disability, love, faith, advocacy, and adaptation. Lea, a folk musician, Broadway composer, and disability advocate, was born with Osteogenesis Imperfecta, a genetic condition that affects bone development. From the beginning, however, her memoir resists the familiar and limiting narratives often imposed on disabled people. This is not a story about overcoming disability, nor is it a simple celebration of perseverance. Instead, Lea offers something more intimate and more interesting: a portrait of a creative life built through imagination, interdependence, humor, frustration, access barriers, and love.
Music is at the heart of the memoir, both as subject and structure. Lea writes about becoming transfixed by an orchestra performance as a child and wanting to play the cello, only to find that the instrument did not fit her body in the expected way. Her solution, holding a violin upright in her wheelchair like a small cello, captures one of the book’s central themes. Adaptation, in Lea’s telling, is not a lesser version of participation. It is a form of artistry. Throughout the memoir, she returns to the idea that making a life often means making things work with the body one has, within the world one has inherited, and against the barriers that should not have been there in the first place.
One of the memoir’s strengths is Lea’s ability to write about disability without flattening it into either tragedy or triumph. There are moments of pain, discrimination, fear, and exhaustion, as Lea describes the inaccessibility of the music industry and the assumptions she encounters from others. Yet these moments do not define the whole of the book. Lea writes with humor and tenderness about family, creativity, romance, sexuality, and the strange practicalities of moving through a world that is often not built with disabled people in mind. Her voice is inviting and direct, making the book easy to move through even when the experiences she describes are difficult.
The sections about music and touring are especially compelling. After winning NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Contest in 2016, Lea became a full-time touring musician, a dream that also exposed how inaccessible performance spaces, travel, and professional expectations can be. These passages are some of the book’s most effective because they show how access is not an abstract political issue but a daily condition informing whether someone can work, create, perform, and be received fully as an artist. Lea’s advocacy emerges not as a separate identity from her musicianship, but as something made necessary by the conditions of the world around her.
The memoir is also a love story in several senses. It is a love letter to music, to disabled embodiment, to chosen work, and to the relationships that make life possible. Lea writes about love without making it sentimental or uncomplicated. Instead, she allows care, intimacy, dependence, and vulnerability to exist alongside frustration and uncertainty. This gives the book much of its emotional power. The book is not only about being loved despite disability, but about how disability can shape the terms of love, creativity, and connection in meaningful ways.
What makes It Wasn’t Meant to Be Perfect so affecting is its refusal of perfection as a goal. Lea does not present life as something that becomes valuable only when hardship is transformed into success. Rather, she suggests that value can be found in the imperfect, improvised, and unfinished: in the altered instrument, the inaccessible venue challenged, the relationship sustained, the song performed anyway. The memoir’s accessibility as a piece of writing is part of its appeal. It is thoughtful without being difficult, emotionally open without being simplistic, and political without losing sight of ordinary human experience.
For readers interested in disability, music, memoir, or the creative life, Lea’s book offers a moving and memorable account of what it means to make art in a world that too often treats access as an afterthought. It is a lovely story, but not a painless one. Its beauty lies in the way Lea holds joy and grief together, reminding readers that disability is not separate from love, ambition, humor, sexuality, faith, or art. It Wasn’t Meant to Be Perfect is ultimately a memoir about making a life, not perfectly, but fully.
Title: It Wasn’t Meant to Be Perfect: A Memoir
Author: Gaelynn Lea
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Date: 2026
Read A. C. Riffer’s reviews of Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming; In Sickness and in Health: Love Stories from the Front Lines of America’s Caregiving Crisis; Disabling Intelligences: Legacies of Eugenics and How We are Wrong about AI; and Respecting Disability: Attitudes, Ideals, and Relationships, in this issue of Wordgathering.
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About the Reviewer
A. C. Riffer is a hopeless romantic and enigmatically so. In their spare time, they somehow managed to earn a doctorate in Social Work from the University of Illinois Chicago, where their research explored censorship and culture.