Reviewed by A. C. Riffer
Shane and Hannah Burcaw, known online as Squirmy and Grubs, have built a large digital following by sharing their relationship and their lives as an interabled couple with openness, humor, and care. In Interabled: True Stories About Love and Disability, they extend that conversation beyond their YouTube channel, curating essays from couples who live, love, and navigate the world across a range of disabilities and relationships.
Coming to this collection without prior familiarity with the couple’s channel, I found it both tender and accessible; a primer in the ways disability and intimacy coexist. The tone throughout is inviting rather than confrontational, offering readers a gentle entry point into disability awareness. For readers who are new to these conversations, it’s an affirming, even joyful read. For those already grounded in disability rights or community, the book may feel more like a “Disability 101” text than a radical new lens, but one that still holds value in its warmth and sincerity.
Squirmy and Grubs frame their project as a form of advocacy. In “TSA Nightmare,” they write that advocacy, for them, means sharing deeply personal stories to illuminate issues that often go unseen. The collection fulfills that mission: each story opens a small window onto everyday realities, public stares, inaccessible spaces, bureaucratic indignities, without losing sight of humor or love. The book’s cumulative message is simple and powerful: disabled people and their partners deserve autonomy, respect, and romance like anyone else.
At its heart, Interabled is a celebration of normalcy. While one essay explicitly discusses the “normalcy” of interabled relationships, the entire anthology reinforces it through lived examples. Readers are invited into moments of tenderness, frustration, absurdity, and joy that will feel recognizable to anyone who has ever been in love.
I did pause at the inclusion of a couple whose relationship centers around Harry Potter, a choice that feels at odds with the book’s inclusive spirit given J. K. Rowling’s transphobic legacy and the presence of trans contributors elsewhere in the collection. Still, the anthology as a whole succeeds in highlighting that the world becomes better for everyone when it is more accessible, and that fear or discomfort around disability can be softened by proximity and empathy.
Ultimately, Interabled is a sweet, humanizing collection, one that invites readers to see love not as an exception to disability but as part of its fabric.
Title: Interabled: True Stories About Love and Disability from Squirmy & Grubs and Other Interabled Couples
Authors: Shane and Hannah Burcaw
Publisher: Macmillan (Roaring Brook Press)
Date: 2025
Read A. C.’s review of I Do Know Some Things
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About the Reviewer
A. C. Riffer is a hopeless romantic and enigmatically so. In their spare time, they somehow managed to earn a doctorate in Social Work from the University of Illinois Chicago, where their research explored censorship and culture.