Reviewed by Rachael A. Zubal-Ruggieri
Content Warnings: Monsters, horror, eugenics, Nazism, homicide, graphic language that may be offensive to some readers
“…A true story of the monster within us all.”
(Book trailer for The Backwards Hand)
As described on the publisher’s webpage, The Backwards Hand is a horror-themed memoir that “…interrogates what it means to be a cripple (sic) in a predominantly ableist society, deconstructing how perceptions of disability are—and are not—reflected in art and media.”
Lee begins with an ominous and terse preface: “I came out wrong.” The rest of the text is divided into eight quasi-thematic sections: “The Creature Walks among Us,” “The Disembodied,” “Fiend without a Face,” “How to Make a Monster,” “The Damned,” “Terror Is a Man,” “The Vengeance of the Flesh,” and “Bigger Than Life.” There are brief acknowledgements and over 200 notes providing supplementary, contextual commentary.
While the book’s structure may seem at times meandering, as a result of his writing and research, Lee is unsettled, and horrified, after facing the unseen, the unknown. After all, he’s forging into a space and existence that he’s never truly occupied, and never fully identified with before: Disability.
Through this memoir, Lee has created a literary monster of his own. Some segments are longer than others—as well as intensive, offensive, and galling—while others are single sentences or words. He jumps sporadically at times from his own life to famous individuals including pop culture icons. Through detailed research and his themed comparisons, Lee draws together these snippets with a unique textual style, binding these disparate yet periodically misshapen globs of narrative and fact together to make sense of his still emerging reality in a weirdly poetic, Frankensteinian way.
Throughout the book, Lee uses a framing method that I think of and refer to as “monster” declarations or disclosures:
“The monster is not without affection.” (p. 8)
“Pity the monster. Beneath the monster’s ugliness lies a soul, humanity masked by deformity. Within the monster we all see ourselves, what we might become.” (p. 15)
“The monster only comes out at night.” (p. 95)
“If the monster acknowledges the pain he has caused and renounces his wicked ways, would you give him another chance? Does the beast deserve mercy? Do I?” (p. 220)
There were instances when I wasn’t always certain if Lee was referring to himself (as [a] monster) or if these monster segments served as third-person threads of a sort, or even a little bit of both, but the intent seemed to be the same. They serve as checkpoints, pausing to circle back to (or even away from) the dreadfulness Lee either endured himself or uncovered.
He pivots constantly, segment by segment, shifting subjects from Nazis to eugenics to Social Security fraud to cult horror films. Then Lee weaves other tidbits into the text as well, such as the increasing depravity of a Disabled serial killer, Diane Arbus’s often critiqued photography of Disabled subjects, and comparison clusters, including one that upsets me. Lee contrasts the activism inherent in the Capitol Crawl to the horrific climatic crawling through the mud scene toward the end of the film Freaks. There are several more shifts of this type, offering a literary hodgepodge of sporadic, textual memes. There are even more interdisciplinary topics intertwined and considered, including religion, philosophy, sexuality, and literature.
Hand is a meandering reflection upon Lee’s life, perhaps with a tiny bit of sentimentality, but mostly with a great deal of regret. Upon the birth of his son, Lee realized he hadn’t been living a pristine life—this book serves as a confession, among other things. Lee knows well that not all Disabled people can or should be expected to be saints, himself included: “Disability does not preclude one being an asshole. I should know” (p. 161, emphasis added). But not all Disabled people are monsters either.
While Lee doesn’t quite fall into the ableist trope of the bitter cripple, he certainly lands adjacent to such imagery. He confesses his foibles, many of them unpleasant for sure, while resentment trickles through his disclosures and all the factual nuggets. While not rage-filed dirges, the stories Lee tells are, as noted, often unsettling. Lee purposely uses the term “cripple” in order to generate discomfort:
I want the book to be confrontational. I want to deliberately use ugly and offensive language [like the word ‘cripple’] that is going to make people uncomfortable, and also kind of reflect the double standard that people still toss these words around without really thinking about how hurtful they might be. (Matt Lee, Fangoria interview).
While Lee has seemingly reconciled his condition through his love of horror, it is not clear whether or not he has ever fully identified as Disabled or documented any real life connection with any Disability community. In Lee’s attempt to identify increasingly (or perhaps more than had been the case previously) with the Disability community, his use of the word “cripple” (while offensive to some) is perhaps an aspect of his self-acceptance. Claiming oneself as “cripple” (or Disabled or Crip) can, for some, be an example of what Simi Linton refers to as “reassigning meaning”:
Cripple, gimp, and freak as used by the disability community have transgressive potential. They are personally and politically useful as a means to comment on oppression because they assert our right to name experience” (Linton, 1998, p. 17, emphasis added).
My interpretation is that Lee’s self-awareness is ongoing; he’s still processing, his identity is still in flux. By co-mingling his own horror stories (namely, his less-than-stellar behavior as well as his mental health struggles) amongst his revelatory analyses of frightening historical facts and pop culture horror trivia, Lee recounts how far he’s come towards self-acceptance. “I am content to be a cripple” (p. 220).
By comparing real-life to imaginative, fictional representations, Lee shares potential life lessons via patchworks of prose, pulling disparate fragments together in unexpected ways. Lee’s regret and own forms of monstrousness emerge gradually from all this mish-mash, and he and others may find less constraint in making such confessions, both good and bad. “…It [horror] becomes comforting because it’s a vessel in which we can channel otherness” (Matt Lee, Fangoria interview).
Contemplative and reflexive, not everyone will appreciate the book’s erratic textual flow, as Lee’s shifts might be a bit too messy for some readers. Lee admits the shifts were done on purpose: “My goal [with this book] is to rub your face in your mess and have you take a hard look at it” (Matt Lee, Fangoria interview).
This is no ordinary treatise on Disability pride. Far from it. Instead, Lee shares how living with a rare congenital Disability affected him and in the process of telling his story, he used his love of horror to work through the identity crisis that emerged upon what he found.
Horror is therapeutic, it’s a coping mechanism, it’s a kind of way to work through these problems we have in terms of our identity, feeling like we don’t fit in or feeling like we’ve been ostracized or demonized. Horror flips the scripts and inverts a lot of these societal pressures that are put on us. (Matt Lee, Fangoria interview)
By writing this book, Lee documents a personal wake up call in response to rampant, historic ableism. Most of all, Lee wants the reader to squirm in their seats when reading this memoir, much like he, I, and many others have squirmed in our seats while watching horror films in the dark, scared as hell, but secretly cheering on the monster the whole time.
Sources:
Linton, S. (1998). Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity [Cultural Front]. NYU Press.
Peace, B. (2013, June 3). Bitterness: A Flawed Concept. Bad Cripple [Blog]. Retrieved from: https://badcripple.blogspot.com/2013/06/bitterness-flawed-concept.html.
Restaino, M. (2024, April 26). THE BACKWARDS HAND: Exploring The Horrifying History of Disability In Horror. Exclusive interview with author Matt Lee. Fangoria Magazine. Retrieved https://www.fangoria.com/the-backwards-hand-disability-in-horror-movies/.
Note: Read more about the book on Matt Lee’s website: https://www.mattleewrites.com/home/the-backwards-hand
Title: The Backwards Hand: A Memoir
Author: Matt Lee
Publisher: Curbstone Books, an imprint of Northwestern University Press
Date: 2024
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About the Reviewer
Rachael A. Zubal-Ruggieri (she/her/hers, they/them/theirs) is a long-time employee at Syracuse University. She co-created (with Diane R. Wiener) “Cripping” the Comic Con, the first of its kind interdisciplinary and international symposium on disability and popular culture, previously held at SU. At conferences and as a guest lecturer for many years, Rachael has presented on the X-Men comic books, popular culture, and disability rights and identities from her perspective as a Neurodivergent person and as a Mad Queer Crip. Entries in their “Micro Mutant Postcard Project” have been published in Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature and Stone of Madness. Their most recent publications include two articles (co-authored with Diane R. Wiener) in the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies‘ Special Issue, “Cripping Graphic Medicine I: Negotiating Empathy and the Lived Experiences of Disability in and through Comics” (Volume 17, Issue 3).