Reviewed by Michael Northen
In the introduction to her memoir Falling For Myself, Dorothy Ellen Palmer announces:
“if you’re expecting an inspiring tale about the importance of getting back up, you’ll be disappointed. Here’s my truth: I’m a faller and will always be one. Falling makes me bloody furious and it makes me furiously proud. Now that I understand exactly what makes me fall, I know what I can, and can’t, do about it. I’m learning to retrace my scarred history, to channel shame into solidarity, anger into analysis, denial into delight, and loss into love.
In this straightforward declaration, Palmer accomplishes two things, both deserving of credit. She pushes back against the notion that any disabled life worth writing about has to be cast as a story of overcoming and she has disabused her audience of the idea that all disabled people want to be “fixed.” Readers seeking those narratives are not her audience. Just who Palmer believes her audience to be is a trickier question, and one that I’ll return to later.
The first five chapters of the memoir may well be the book’s most rewarding. Not only do they set the stage for everything that happened afterwards including some of the attitudes that were fostered and carry throughout the book, they also give a glimpse into the lives of Canadian people – at least in one locale – and establish a certain ground point that needs to be kept in mind in approaching contemporary discussions of disability. Palmer tells us of her adoption, of discovering her biological parents, of the difficulties with her atypical feet from the outset, her initial diagnosis/prognosis, and her early school days. At the risk of front-loading the book, I want cite a couple passages that strike me as especially compelling.
If there is one person in her life that Palmer can find little bad to say about, it is Dr. Salter, the doctor who first diagnosed the real situation with her feet, eliminating any belief that it was either clubfoot or that she was faking it. He tells her “…instead of twenty-six bones each, your left foot has eighteen and your right has nineteen. Your muscles and ligaments are likewise unique. They pull your feet over, like permanently twisted ankles.” He also is honest in telling her that there are no cures but with a series of operations, he can extend the time that she will be able to walk.
While this all seems encouraging, an episode with medical personnel at age eleven reveals just how unaware the medical establishment of those times was of how their treatment affected the young patients they dealt with. Palmer’s mother tells her that they are going on an outing.
“Your’re going to do something fun today. You’re going to make a movie”
“Why? I don’t want to. What for?”
“Its for sicence. It’s so they can study how you walk. To show other doctors.”
“But I don’t want – “
“Don’t be selfish, Dorothy. I already told them you’d do it.
Hoping for Hollywood, I got a dingy room in the basement. A circle of floodlights glared on a swept and prepped terrazzo stage, covered in sheets of brown paper. It was a solo command performance, but extras hovered in the wings: Dr. Salter and his understudies. Without explanation, a nurse stripped me naked. Hefting a paint roller, she spread the bottoms of my feet with India ink. For the first of what would be many times in my life, I met a delusional director. “Ok, honey. Forget we’re all here. Just walk normally.
My mother stood silent in the wings watching her daughter, a girl with first swelling of breast buds, limp in the nude. Fall spread-legged, nude. Gawked at by a room full of smoking men.”
If Palmer was mistreated because of her differentness, she was not blameless herself. She reports that in school, in order to be accepted by others, she became part of a group that harassed other girls who were different. If there is any doubt about how vicious seventh grade girls can be to one another they need only read, how that group harassed and bullied a poverty-stricken German girl leaving her naked on the school playground. It is a prelude to some less extreme experiences in which Palmer finds herself the target of the same group. Equally compelling is the author’s account of how she refused to go a dance with the first boy who took a real interest in her because despite the fact that he was – intelligent, talented, and good looking – he used crutches and braces.
The remainder of the book takes readers through Palmer’s life as she develops into an activist, teacher, and retiree up to the present day. Frequently, a given chapter is an opportunity for a sidebar where the author moves from personal experience one of the general concerns commonly voiced by disabled people and/or disabled scholarship such as bathroom access, handicapped parking, portrayal of disability in literature, and the use of various terms of disability like as “crip” or “disabled person.” Issues that almost anyone would grant were of importance.
Despite what it has to offer, I have some concerns about Falling for Myself. Some of it is personal taste, some more valid. Call me Scrooge, but I do not find Henny Youngman style humor funny nor despite, Palmer’s assertion “I know the abled world finds slapstick funny,” do I enjoy slapstick, verbal or otherwise. Apparently, though, Palmer feels it is the ticket to connecting with her audience and it is as unavoidable in her memoir as rain in Seattle. After a few chapters, puns and gag jokes become tedious to me and distract from what is already intrinsically interesting material. This becomes doubly true when scatological humor is stirred into the mix, which is on virtually every page. The book’s chapter on bathroom access made me feel as though I had walked in on a conversation in a fifth grade boys locker room. I was looking for the exit.
Perhaps it is because I am an American who is fed-up with having a president incapable of making a statement about anyone who differs from him without resorting to insult, mockery or name-calling, that one-sided assaults that totally ignore the validity of any position other than one’s own are particularly troubling to me, and I find them becoming increasingly prevalent in disability-related writing. It isn’t a far stretch from Trump’s offhand labeling and blaming every issue on illegal immigrants to Palmer’s penchant for calling everything that aggravates her “ableist.”
While ableism isn’t a new concept to those involved with disability studies or activism, it is likely to be new to those who aren’t, disabled or not. As a teacher for over thirty years (especially one who admits that despite being an English teacher she never taught a book by or about a disabled woman), it is hard to imagine that Palmer doesn’t understand that you don’t bring a person to understanding by bashing them over the head and insulting them. That is why at the outset I mentioned my curiosity about who her audience was (assuming that since she has sought a publisher, writing the book was not strictly therapy). It isn’t for those living with the issues she is discussing, since that would be preaching to the choir, and with its Jonathan Edwards approach, it can’t be for those who have not yet been “enlightened.” I wonder who she has in mind.
At the risk of seeming a curmudgeon, I do have one other bone to pick. Though Charles Dickens was among the most generous and foreward-looking novelists of his time in portraying diversity among his characters, Tiny Tim has become the piñata at which nearly every disabled writer takes a swipe, and, notwithstanding the fact that it was long ago emptied of candy, Palmer takes great delight in pummeling him further. What is the point (or logic) in calling Tiny Tim “a pernicious little shit?” It is a waste of energy when the author could be making a real contribution by leading us to other literary work whose portrayal might affect disability more subtly and in ways that we had not considered.
Palmer’s life story is interesting in itself. What she has learned from her experience and has to tell others is valuable, and she clearly has the skills to render those experiences in terms that no one needs a Ph.D. to understand. I sincerely wish that she had simply done that. It is unfortunate that she feels compelled to let all of the comic schlock and vinegar hijack what she has to say.
As it sits, though, Palmer certainly chose the right publisher, and that deserves recognition as well. Wolsak & Wynn publishers, based in “beautiful post-industrial” Hamilton, Ontario describes itself as a “charmingly contrary press…dedicated to publishing clear, passionate Canadian voices.”
Title: Falling for Myself
Author: Dorothy Ellen Palmer
Publisher: Wolsak & Wynn
Date: 2019
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About the Reviewer
Michael Northen is the former editor of Wordgathering and an editor with Jennifer Bartlett and Sheila Black of the anthology Beauty is a Verb: the New Poetry of Disability. He is also an editor of the recent anthology of disability short fiction, The Right Way to Be Crippled and Naked (Cinco Puntos Press).