“Gatherer’s Blog” is an invited feature that provides emergent as well as seasoned writers with opportunities to reflect upon aspects of their own writing processes.
The Teen Protagonist Who Schooled Me
by Ona Gritz
I was twenty-five when I met Hope, my first friend with a disability similar to mine. This was life-changing in all the best ways. We talked and talked, jumping in to finish each other’s sentences out of the excitement and relief of being so deeply understood.
As with many new relationships, there was an ache to it, too. A wish that we had found each other years earlier. Specifically, as middle schoolers, an age when nearly everyone, disabled or not, feels itchy and ashamed in their own skin.
And so, I time traveled, the only way I knew how. By sitting at my writing desk and placing fictionalized preteen versions of the two of us in a seventh-grade classroom. There, we faced down ableist bullies and slowly learned to love ourselves the way we so easily loved each other.
Back in real life, it was my great luck that Hope had a friend who happened to be a children’s book editor. I sent the editor my chapters and, while she offered encouraging words about my facility for capturing the voice and inner life of a twelve-year-old, the story didn’t interest her. My book fell into the category, she said, of bibliotherapy. Looking back, it’s possible she was referring to my approach to the subject. But what I believed then, and what still seems likely to me now, is that, at that time, the mid-1980’s, any story featuring a disabled protagonist would have been seen as more medical than literary.
Thankfully, literature for young people has long since evolved, with a call for diversity and an understanding that kids, like all of us, need to see people like themselves in the pages of books.
As a public librarian, a writer and lover of kidlit, a mother who read to her son nightly, I was there to watch this change happen, and it thrilled me. I gobbled up Harriet McBryde Johnson’s Accidents of Nature, Ron Koertge’s Stoner & Spaz, Suzanne Kamata’s Gadget Girl. Yet, in my own work, while I explored the disability experience in essays and poems I wrote for adults, the main characters in the books I went on to write for younger readers were all able-bodied. This wasn’t deliberate. Nor was it a reaction, at least not consciously, to that first editor’s assessment of my long-ago draft. The stories that came to me were the stories that came to me. And, for decades, those stories happened to be populated by non-disabled kids.
Then, finally, about a year and a half ago, a door in my imagination opened and a teenager walked in with a palsied gait I recognized as my own.
Cara, the protagonist in The Space You Left Behind, my first young adult verse novel, is a lover of mystery novels and podcasts. While pursuing a family mystery of her own as a means of pursuing a mystery-loving boy, she stumbles upon a secret that shakes her to the core.
Too much time has passed for me to remember what false notions and preconceptions I may have brought to my first attempt to write a disability-centered story for young readers. But when I began drafting Cara’s story, I believed I had to exaggerate her insecurities about her cerebral palsy as compared to mine at her age. Disability, I told myself, hadn’t been enough of a dramatic or defining aspect of my growing up to be a worthy plot element in a novel. From what I remembered of high school, I’d felt more self-conscious about being unable to get my hair to wing back like Farrah Fawcett’s than about my lack of dexterity or my limp.
But, as I continued to write and to get to know Cara, she, as teens do, schooled me. Every moment of embarrassment or feeling of inadequacy I gave her came with a faint nudge or a barely audible ahem. How did you know that feeling so precisely? I’d hear Cara ask, until I finally allowed that maybe I hadn’t been a more well-adjusted teen than my fictional counterpart. Maybe I’d been in denial. Cara, on the other hand, didn’t slow her own progress by hiding her feelings about her cerebral palsy from herself. And so, when it took her a few weeks, as opposed to my several decades, to discover that acceptance and pride about her disability, along with community, were hers for the having, it felt right.
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking,” Joan Didion famously said. Writing Cara helped me find out how I’d once felt. Maybe, in that sense, it’s not so far off to think of our books and poems and essays—the ones we write and the ones we read—as bibliotherapy. Literature allows us to understand ourselves more deeply. To discover we’re not so alone in our differences. To develop empathy by recognizing all we share in common with people we previously thought of as other. Put simply, literature heals us.
Editor’s Note: Read Julia V. Betancourt’s review of Ona Gritz’s The Space You Left Behind in Wordgathering
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About the Author
Ona Gritz’s new memoir, Everywhere I Look, won the Readers’ Choice Gold Award for Best Adult Book, the Independent Author Award in New Nonfiction, the Independent Author Award in True Crime, and is an Independent Book Review 2024 Must-Read. Her nonfiction has appeared widely, including in The New York Times, The Guardian, Brevity, Parents, and River Teeth. Among her recent honors are two Notable mentions in The Best American Essays and a Best Life Story in Salon. The Space You Left Behind, Ona’s first young adult novel, written in verse, has just been released from West 44 Books and is featured in The Children’s Book Council’s Hot Off the Press roundup of anticipated best sellers.