The book is called Suffer For This” and, as a long-time online friend, albeit one where we’ve never even broken bread because of the country in between us and because your Bohemian Crip can’t globe-hop like she might want, I had to check this out. The first thing I’d say is that, especially given that the title is “Suffer For This”, I’m glad I didn’t have to. At times, it can be hard to know what to say about a friend’s work, especially when he has edited you before.(I do feel like I know Victor on a more intimate level now, since it was our hobbies that brought us together initially, and at a point when you might be past the whole collegiate What Does It All Mean? bull-session thing. )
We never really got to love and marriage, much less the “things that you do in the dark that make the daytime seem all right” or whatever the Tennessee Williams quote really is—I’m close, all right? The fact that might be good enough for me probably says something about my declining standards, but there was a point where I’d never make this post because my “Life is my Adena Watson case,” energy would mean hours of tracking down the quote and forgetting about what I wanted it for. Given that, I think a certain amount of imprecision counts as a personal best. Which means, I think you can tell that I liked reading about some of the encounters that made it somewhere between prose, poetry, and memoir in this book without relating very much at all. “Purely physical” is more about eating when I’m not hungry, if you’re me. Not anything that makes you sweat. I think, if I had to describe my own love life and couldn’t use phrases like “that one time,” or even more sadly, “in my in-box”, I might have to go back to a poster that hung in the independent-living center when I was at my crip-power fiercest—hey, it was the 1990s-we thought we still had hope—Anyway, there was a poster of a deaf woman ordering a pizza on a TTY, and the caption read “It took an act of Congress to order this pizza,” and that’s what my history is like. At least,it could make a sentence now; at times, I’ve had my doubts. But, yeah, not a lot of room for falling into things, so I might have read something like this and judged it a lot instead of appreciating it—the one thing disabled people always get to be is Too Good For This World—the “so, could you leave?” is often implied. So, maybe it’s good I didn’t know that stuff before. I’d have read it wrong, anyway.
Even though, as you might have guessed, I’m sort of behind for my age, so I might always be down to yak about What It All Means in person, if somewhat short of things to contribute.) I really liked this book. I found it tough, tender, and revealing.
