Reviewed by Michael Northen
Almost two decades into the twenty-first century disability memoir is enjoying a wide audience. While this is good news for disability literature and for readers in general, it also poses a challenge to would-be memoirists. What do they have to offer a reader that is new or different? It might be a little known situation, a unique viewpoint or an engaging literary style. In the case of Susan Rudnick’s Edna’s gift, what the reader is offered are two sisters with very different perspectives on disability.
Edna’s Gift is clearly written and essentially follows a straight linear narrative. The natural sequence of events in the discovery of each of the sister’s disabilities works well to create and then heighten interest in the book. Section one of the book focuses on the emerging recognition by Susan (and Susan’s parents) that her younger sister Edna is somehow different. Merely sisters and playmates in pre-school, it becomes clear that Edna does not learn as quickly as other children and that her movements seem different, as well. Seen through Susan’s eyes, Edna’s entry into school is a particular problem because, being exceptionally concerned with how she is perceived by the popular girls in school, she is torn between wanting to protect her sister and being embarrassed by her. It is a theme that in one form or another follows her as a leitmotif of the book. By the end of the book’s first section, Edna’s parents have tried several educational environments for her and, at the end, she ends up at a rural residential community known as The Club.
The second section of the book introduces Susan and the reader to her own disability. Like Edna’s, Susan’s has existed since birth as well, but in contrast, is not as observable to the outside world nor would it affect her education or career, but it is actually a much more somatic one. In a physical exam at fifteen years old, Susan is told that she has no uterus. Among other problems that it causes her, one consequence is that she can never have children. This sets up an ironic parallel between Susan and her sister. While neither of them can ever expect to have children, Edna simply takes this in stride as part of her existence. For Susan, on the other hand, who desperately wants to be normal, it becomes an Ahab-like obsession.
From this point on, the book shifts to focus primarily on Susan’s life, the physical distance from Edna being reflected in her lessening presence in the book. Implicit in the book’s problematic subtitle, How My Broken Sister Taught Me Be Whole, is the promise that the story will draw to an end as Edna’s life does, and at the very end of Edna’s life, she once more becomes a factor in Susan’s. The irony here is that if Edna’s life taught Susan anything, it should have been that Edna (and for that matter, anyone else with a disability) is not “broken.” What little the book gives us of Edna’s actual words certainly suggests that she does not see herself as broken. As someone who has made it the work of this journal to promote disability literature, I can only hope that this subtitle was thrust upon Rudnick by the publishers wanting to pander to pity and not of the author’s own choosing. Readers will have to be the judges.
As Edna grows she moves from public school, to residential community, to nursing home and finally to a locked-in unit. It is a progression that would move some disability activists to consign the perpetrators do Dante’s ninth circle. The author herself (and many of the readers) are also uncomfortable with the idea that this is what is in store for a family member with a disability. But Edna, does not see it this way – and that is where the teaching indicated in the subtitle comes in. With a zen-like focus on life as a series of present moments, she finds enjoyment in every situation that she is in and while Susan frequently feels that her own life is in stasis at best, Edna carves out a life for herself where she finds fulfillment and even joy in each new situation.
One of the more curious features of Edna’s Gift is a series of reading questions at the back of the book. While there is nothing unusual about questions in a literary anthology, it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to conceive of one’s own life as a text for teaching.
Nevertheless, I do think that there is a lot to be learned from reading memoir, particularly for readers planning to write memoir themselves. Key among these is that any memoir is a fabrication to the extent that events are selected, omitted, re-shaped and re-interpreted to create a story that provides a particular perspective. There were many occasions in reading Edna’s Gift when I wondered how the scene would have looked if it had been narrated by one of the other characters and not Susan Rudnick. Perhaps the most revealing of these scenes comes when Rudnick, unmarried at the time, comes to her mother to let her know that she want to adopt a child. To Rudnick’s surprise, her mother has reservations.
“Susan, it’s not the money. Look, I just don’t think it would be a good idea for you to be a mother.”
“What are you talking about?” My fingers curled into fists.
“Your very involved with you own things and you work in a demanding career,” she went on. “Yes, I know you don’t like to hear it, but you have a tendency to be self-centered and…”
While Rudnick, describes herself as stunned by this statement, most readers are likely to nod and say, “Yes, that’s what I’ve been thinking all along.” The sense of self-absorption reaches it’s height in the last paragraph of the chapter in which her mother dies. “She comforted me about my deepest fears…she affirmed my deepest dreams of becoming a mother.” [Italics mine] Her mother’s death seems to be more about Rudnick than her mother.
Notwithstanding this tendency – likely inherent to most of us – Edna’s gift is a very readable book and one that is likely to hook the reader once they are started. The way that disability affects the two sisters in such different but very real ways reveals much about our society and there are likely to be few women reading it who would not be able to relate to the social pressures that having been born with MRKH syndrome puts the author under.
Moreover, Rudnick’s book raises some valid questions about perception of institutional care. In short, the perceptions of everyone else may not mesh with those of the person to whom it is actually happening. As someone who worked in a residential wheelchair community for years, I’ve seen both sides of the story. While it is true that there are adults (especially those coming later in life) who feel that they have been jettisoned by their families, it is equally true that there were residents who loved the life they had there and tried to resist the efforts of activists who insisted they should be out living on their own. If it does nothing else than get readers to consider what disabled people in institutions have to say about their own situation, Edna’s Gift is worth reading.
Title: Edna’s Gift
Author: Susan Rudnick
Publisher: She Writes Press
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).