I Live a Life Like Yours: A Memoir

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About I Live A Life Like Yours: A Memoir

Product Description A brilliantly rendered essayistic autobiography from an award-winning Norwegian author about life in a vulnerable body.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. Review "A quietly brilliant book that warms slowly in the hands . . . Artful." ―Dwight Garner, The New York Times“[Grue's] book―which doubles as a work of literary criticism and cultural history―is, yes, an elegant meditation on what it’s like to be a body that does not resemble most other bodies, but it’s also about aging, parenthood, memory, academia, and love. A tart and spare palate cleanser.” ―Molly Young, Vulture "Grue elegantly flows between memoir, essay, and intellectual discourse in this magnificent story about living with a disability . . 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." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)“A sensitive examination of the meaning of disability . . . Frank and often moving . . . Absorbing, insightful reflections on being human.” ―Kirkus (starred review)"Lyrical . . . A gentle recollection of a life in which disability appears to be no match for tenacity." ―Tony Miksanek, Booklist"Jan Grue’s I Live a Life like Yours is the story of a journey from a childhood lived under a medical diagnosis that predicted a life diminished by disability to an adulthood replete with fulfilling work, family, and life that undoes the expectations the world presses upon those of us who live with disabilities. Along the way, Grue moves from the confines of what the doctors and teachers expect from a boy whose diagnosis is a story of an uncertain future, to the truly open future that Grue finds in books, art, love, and the eager surge toward life. The story of a life lived well with disabilities is a surprise to almost everyone who thinks of themselves as free from the limitations many of us assume disability inevitably brings. All of us, whether we consider ourselves disabled or nondisabled, will understand more fully what it means to be human if we accompany Jan Grue in his rich travels from his story of limitation to his story of fulf