Reviewed by Kate Champlin
Content Warning: Nazism, audism, ableism
This work’s prologue recounts what many would consider a disability nightmare scenario. At age eleven, Claudia Marseille was invited to a district track meet but could not understand any of the directions. She didn’t run in any of the races, instead standing in the field and looking futilely for visual cues. None of the adults around her intervened, including her own parents. She cried on the way home.
For some readers, this autobiography will be a shocking look at life with a disability in the days before accommodations became standard in schools. Marseille was born in the 1950s. Other readers will simply appreciate the autobiography for its insights on life with a disability and interesting details from several previous decades.
Marseille’s exploration of her cultural heritage will be meaningful to many readers. Marseille’s mother was a German Jew who survived the Nazis through a combination of passing and hiding. Marseille visited Germany several times and also spent time on a kibbutz in Israel after high school. Her father was a member of the German resistance with connections in the international sociology and psychology communities. He studied under Martin Heidegger; when Marseille was very young, she met Hannah Arendt. The moment when Marseille’s father first teaches her about the Nazi Holocaust, asking her “Do you know what evil looks like?” is chilling (50).
Marseille begins her memoir by situating readers in her childhood perspective:
My earliest memories are completely silent. Not yet knowing what it was to hear and speak, I had no idea what I’d been missing, that other people experienced the world differently. As a very little girl, I felt completely at home in my world defined by visual communication and other sensory clues I received through scent, touch, and taste. Silence wasn’t a lack or an absence. It simply was—a familiar backdrop to my experience. (1)
By extolling the positive nature of silence, Marseille sets up a powerful counter to traditional narratives of pity for Deaf and hard-of-hearing people. As Marseille reminds us, a silent world is not a tragedy or even a disadvantage. It simply is. In many ways, the autobiography chronicles Marseille’s attempts to relearn this lesson. Unfortunately, as a child, Marseille learned to hide her hearing difficulties because of absent accommodations, self-consciousness in a culture where physical differences were not acknowledged, and reluctance to add to her parents’ emotional burdens. The result was a constant stream of misunderstandings combined with lost information and social isolation.
The autobiography continues with Marseille’s often conflicted childhood. After she acquired her first hearing aid, Marseille quickly learned spoken English. Her childhood was marked by her father’s trauma and by parental arguments that eventually led to divorce. Her childhood was equally marked by her hearing disability and by difficult interactions with the hearing community around her. Marseille’s quick thinking led to some playground social successes. When one of her classmates asked if she was a Martian, Marseille replied “No…do you want to try my hearing aid?” and this response helped to normalize her disability for her peers (17). She also bonded with her brother and with select friends, in part, by asking them privately about game rules or group conversations.
Nevertheless, Marseille spent a great deal of time lost in group conversations or unable to reach out to peers. Her autobiography is filled with descriptions of standing on the sidelines and watching others interact, of faking her way through group sing-alongs, and even of being left out of group conversations at her own parties. Since Marseille attended school in the days before accommodations became a legal requirement, her teachers were rarely any help. Teachers who were notified about her hard-of-hearing status allowed her to sit in the front of the room but still showed movies without captions and read book chapters aloud without providing translation or interpretation. Indecipherable class lessons led directly to indecipherable after-school discussions, and the cycle continued.
Marseille developed creative methods of coping with the inaccessible communication around her during school and upon her entry into the workforce. She checked faces for visual cues and learned to laugh at jokes whether or not she understood them. When her job included taking notes on discussions, she took coworkers out for coffee and discretely asked them what they thought of the issues discussed. These coffee meetings often gave her a “goldmine of information” about the original workplace discussions (94). Readers will be both impressed with Marseille’s ingenuity and horrified because such subterfuge was a necessary part of fulfilling basic school and work functions. During her senior year of high school, Marseille also began to advocate for herself when she felt that she could. Although this did not resolve every situation, it did make some things better, particularly in informal conversations with understanding people. Using these methods, Marseille bonded with kibbutz and college roommates and eventually found a career where she did not have to pass for hearing in the workplace.
The book ends with another situation that will be familiar to hard-of-hearing individuals: a conversation that quickly becomes framed by a misunderstanding. Marseille’s daughter, Mira, confronted her one day with “Mommy, we wanna know, what’s God?” (246). Marseille gave a careful answer only for her daughter to repeat the question twice. It turned out that Mira was asking about gauze. Marseille burst into hysterical laughter.
On the one hand, this conversation with Mira reminded Marseille of countless misunderstandings that had marked her life, particularly before she began advocating for herself. On the other hand, this misunderstanding was merely amusing. By this point, no one in Marseille’s circle, including Mira, would judge or mock Marseille for her confusion. Marseille had a thriving photography career and a large group of friends who understood and accommodated her disability. (Marseilles has since earned an MFA in painting, and some of her work is publicly displayed in the San Francisco Bay Area.1 She has also begun giving public piano concerts.) Marseille had a close-knit family that included her beloved mother and stepfather, two beloved siblings, and a supportive husband–in addition to her adored daughter. (Marseille’s father unfortunately died while Marseille was attending college.) As Marseille herself states, life had become “so very good” in spite of lingering challenges (246).
Title: But You Look So Normal: Lost and Found in a Hearing World
Author: Claudia Marseille
Publisher: She Writes Press (Simon & Schuster)
Date: 2024
Note
- Information about and images of Marseille’s paintings can be found here: https://www.claudiamarseille.com/
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About the Reviewer
Kate Champlin (she/her) is a late-deafened adult and a graduate of Ball State University (Indiana). She currently works as a writing tutor and as a contract worker for BK International Education Consultancy, a company whose aim is to normalize the success of underserved students.