| College teachers -- Norway -- Biography. |
| People with disabilities -- Norway -- Biography. |
| Norway |
| Grue, Jan, 1981- |
| Academicians |
| Academics (Persons) |
| College instructors |
| College lecturers |
| College professors |
| College science teachers |
| Lectors (Higher education) |
| Lecturers, College |
| Lecturers, University |
| Professors |
| Universities and colleges -- Teachers |
| University academics |
| University instructors |
| University lecturers |
| University professors |
| University teachers |
| Cripples |
| Disabled |
| Disabled people |
| Disabled persons |
| Handicapped |
| Handicapped people |
| Individuals with disabilities |
| People with physical disabilities |
| Persons with disabilities |
| Physically challenged people |
| Physically disabled people |
| Physically handicapped |
| Kingdom of Norway |
| Kongeriket Noreg |
| Kongeriket Norge |
| Noreg |
| Norga |
| Norge |
| Norgga gonagasriika |
| Norja |
| Noruwē |
| Norvège |
| Norvegia |
| Norveška |
| Norwegen |
| Norwegia |
| ノルウェー |
Available:
Library | Shelf Number | Shelf Location | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Mattapoisett Free Public Library | B GRUE 2021 | BIOGRAPHY | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Middleborough Public Library | B GRUE | BIOGRAPHY | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Richards Memorial Library | 920 G922 | NONFICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
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Summary
Summary
* A New York Times Editors' Choice * Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction Books of 2021 *
I am not talking about surviving. I am not talking about becoming human, but about how I came to realize that I had always already been human. I am writing about all that I wanted to have, and how I got it. I am writing about what it cost, and how I was able to afford it.
Jan Grue was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy at the age of three. Shifting between specific periods of his life--his youth with his parents and sister in Norway; his years of study in Berkeley, St. Petersburg, and Amsterdam; and his current life as a professor, husband, and father--he intersperses these histories with elegant, astonishingly wise reflections on the world, social structures, disability, loss, relationships, and the body: in short, on what it means to be human. Along the way, Grue moves effortlessly between his own story and those of others, incorporating reflections on philosophy, film, art, and the work of writers from Joan Didion to Michael Foucault. He revives the cold, clinical language of his childhood, drawing from a stack of medical records that first forced the boy who thought of himself as "just Jan" to perceive that his body, and therefore his self, was defined by its defects.
I Live a Life Like Yours is a love story. It is rich with loss, sorrow, and joy, and with the details of one life: a girlfriend pushing Grue through the airport and forgetting him next to the baggage claim; schoolmates forming a chain behind his wheelchair on the ice one winter day; his parents writing desperate letters in search of proper treatment for their son; his own young son climbing into his lap as he sits in his wheelchair, only to leap down and run away too quickly to catch. It is a story about accepting one's own body and limitations, and learning to love life as it is while remaining open to hope and discovery.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Norwegian novelist Grue (The Best of All Possible Worlds) elegantly flows between memoir, essay, and intellectual discourse in this magnificent story about living with a disability. Diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy at age three, Grue writes that schoolteachers assumed he "was not going to live for very long." He juxtaposes doctors' notes from the 1980s--which depicted a childhood "containing little joy"--with his inspiring story of how he overcame the obstacles of living with a wheelchair through intellect and will. In 2008, he attended UC Berkeley and, after graduating, returned to Norway where he eventually met his wife Ida, who "expressed the outrage I had always felt" and forced him to confront why the nondisabled tend to "look away." Grue mines how disability has been portrayed in pop culture--with a "particularly tragic aura" or as a trade-off for a supernatural ability ("Professor X from X-Men had to be paralyzed in order to acquire his telepathic abilities")--as well as his experience online dating in a wheelchair. In doing so, he brilliantly articulates what it's like to be "erased and rewritten," and, more poignantly, what it's like to obliterate the narrative one's been handed. This stunning work isn't to be missed. Agent: Norsk Forlag, Gyldendal Agency. (Aug.)
Guardian Review
Jan Grue knows that he is running out of time (which is what we are all doing, of course, though we don't usually live with the knowledge). He is intimately aware that his body is frail and vulnerable (all our bodies are perishable things, sites of pain and bound for extinction, but his is more so). We live in our bodies in the world and in time. As Grue writes in his stunning memoir, there is "no I outside the embodied self" and no "me apart from the body". When we are young, we take this body for granted; we are blind to ourselves and time is not visible. Grue never had such unfettered childhood joy. He was always conscious of himself as someone who was different and therefore "defective". At the age of three, a child living in Oslo with his parents and sister, he was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy, an incurable and progressive condition. The stash of documents he inherited shortly after he became a father himself describe in clinical language what this means in fact: he cannot walk more than a few paces, his feet are twisted, his body is weak, he uses a wheelchair, he will always need help, he often hurts and what is thoughtless for most of us (getting up from a chair, putting on clothes, making a meal, going into a shop) is a matter of planning and excruciating labour for him. How, then, to get through doors, up stairs, into planes; how to go to college, have relationships, fall in love, have a child, have a life that he wanted in a world that sets obstacles, often literally, in his path. I Live a Life Like Yours is not an account of suffering and deprivation, nor is it a redemptive tale of survival against the odds. It is a restrained, dazzlingly intelligent and self-excavating examination of what it has meant to be disabled and visibly different, not "normal". It beautifully describes "the work of being myself in the world" and this work becomes a meditation on what it is to be human, what it is to be lonely and full of hope and yearning. The memoir is not arranged chronologically, but proceeds by its search for "a different kind of language to the one I was offered". He turns to Borges, Foucault, Erving Goffman, the disabled poet Mark O'Brien, but carefully, never recycling them, more pondering their words before finding his own. The past, he writes, is a projection of memory and therefore always now; we are all "palimpsests", manuscripts that are forever being written over. Every life contains alternative lives, ghosts of what might have been, in Grue's case, the self that could run and leap and be unconstrained. Vivid memories are set into the book, some sad and a few that are radiant. I will never forget his description of skating in his wheelchair, skaters one by one attaching themselves to him like iron filings to a magnet, until a ribbon of people snake and flow in his wake. From a very early age, Grue was never alone: he was always accompanied by an adult and therefore always looked at. He experienced this gaze - anxious, curious, speculative, medical - as an act of power over him. Through his childhood and teenage years, he was examined, measured, prodded, weighed, assessed, written up. Under the controlling institutional gaze and the penetrating medical gaze, he learned to despise his own body. He lived in a version of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, the imagined model of the perfect prison system where prisoners never know when they are being observed and therefore "behave as if they are always being observed". The evaluating "clinical gaze" still awaits Grue in the mirror now, showing him a version of himself he has dreamed of slipping free from, like one of the superheroes he was obsessed with as a boy. This gaze, he writes, brings stigma, which is a sign of a "spoiled identity" and a self that is damaged or tainted: "sick, broken, rotten". You cannot escape stigma and its accompanying shame by any action, because it is not rooted in what one does but "who one is". Yet Grue's memoir, in its circling motion, finds a way through shame and "corporeal self-loathing" to something kinder, which is grief. "Grief," he writes, "is the recognition that something or someone is gone forever" and this "someone" can be a self or a version of a self. In therapy, he at last admitted: "I want the same thing as everyone else. But I'm not like everyone else." He finally allowed himself to feel sad and this sadness for what he could not have and "the body that was not" will never go away. "I dream of another world," he writes and the closest he has come to that world is within his little family, the one "into which I was born and the one I have received as a gift¿ the one I have created¿ It is a fiction, it is an empty space in the world. Breathe in." I started off by writing everything that most profoundly moved or excited me in I Live a Life Like Yours into my notebook, but quickly found I was almost copying out the book verbatim. Every sentence works hard for its place. It is smart, moving and original (and superbly translated). It clears a space for itself, brushing worn-out language and familiar ideas to the margins and forging its own "secret history" in order "to take back the world". It makes you read carefully and think feelingly and I'm grateful that it is now in my head and heart, working change.
Kirkus Review
A sensitive examination of the meaning of disability. When he was 3 years old, award-winning Norwegian writer Grue was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy, a degenerative disease that compromised his ability to walk and, doctors predicted, would worsen over time. In a frank and often moving memoir, the author reflects on disability, identity, and difference, drawing on philosophy, sociology, literature, and art: Erving Goffman on the concept of stigma, for example; Joan Didion on grief; Michel Foucault on the clinical gaze. Now a professor, writer, former Fulbright scholar, husband, and father, Grue celebrates considerable accomplishments. "I am writing about all that I wanted to have," he notes, "and how I got it." His parents, both academics, were determined to help him flourish. Their negotiations with the Norwegian Social Services system, however, could be frustrating: "My parents request something, their request is denied, they appeal the denial, they win. This process takes them several months, or years." Nevertheless, the system provided him with benefits such as physical therapy and medical treatments as well as a powered wheelchair that afforded him access to the world, enabling travel to Russia, Amsterdam, Denmark, and the University of California, Berkeley, for his Fulbright. "I am privileged and vulnerable," he admits: privileged because Norway supports its citizens' well-being; vulnerable to people's attitudes about disability as well as to physical obstacles. Grue recalls his loneliness at feeling like "a body that no one, least of all one's self, wishes to know." Who would he have been, he has wondered, if he didn't have a muscular disease? Refreshingly, the author reflects less on his "unlived life" than on the life he lives: The physical deterioration that he anticipated never happened; he found love and companionship; and, he reflects, "at some point or another I stopped thinking about myself as someone who needed repairing." Absorbing, insightful reflections on being human. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This artful, poetic memoir thoughtfully explores life with disability. Norwegian novelist and sociolinguist Grue (Univ. of Oslo) considers his childhood through the lens of who he is as an adult: a successful educator, husband, and father. Grue has lived his entire life with congenital muscular dystrophy. He writes here about learning to accept the physical limitations he encounters in day-to-day life; only when faced with other people's perceptions of him does he see himself through a clinical lens. In this lyrical account, Grue reflects on his diagnosis, but more so on how a diagnosis is only one part of his identity. He thoughtfully muses on the nature of time and describes his life with chronological fluidity, mixing in elements of the past that evolve and acquire new meaning in the present. Grue occasionally digresses from the narrative with relevant quotations and musings, which flow together in a cohesive whole. Crook's translation of Grue's book (first published in 2018 in Norway) upholds the literary quality that won the memoir a Norwegian award for literature. VERDICT An honest look at the complexities of being human no matter how one's body functions. Grue's reflections on life will spark the interest of all readers of literary nonfiction.--Cate Triola, Capella Univ., Minneapolis