Since it’s Valentine’s Day, let’s dispense with the usual discussions of career training and employment opportunities for people with disabilities, and look at a story about what truly makes life matter: love.
PBS NewsHour closed last Thursday’s program with an interview of Rachel Simon (below), author of the 2011 New York Times bestseller, The Story of Beautiful Girl. Simon is embarking on a speaking tour in support of its paperback release, and she sat down with senior correspondent Judy Woodruff to discuss the novel, which is a love story about two people with disabilities.
The Story of Beautiful Girl is the story of Lynnie and Homan, who meet in an institution for people with disabilities and fall “deeply in love,” as the official synopsis puts it. Together, they have a daughter, Julia; but the family is separated when the couple attempts to escape the institution and the infant Julia is left in the care of a woman named Martha, who was providing shelter to the couple in her farmhouse. The book spans 40 years in the lives of these four characters, separated physically but joined by their loyalty and love.
Simon says the impetus for the novel was to shed light on living conditions for some people with disabilities. As we wrote about at the end of January, states like Virginia are just now starting the process of transitioning people with disabilities from large institutions into community-based settings. She tells Woodruff:
… [T]here had been some major civil rights developments in the lives of people with disabilities. And the major one is called self-determination, that people with disabilities have the right to choose how to live their own lives.
For Simon, The Story of Beautiful Girl is a continuation of work she began in 2002 with Riding the Bus with My Sister. That book is memoir about her younger sister, Beth, a woman with disabilities who invites Simon to accompany her on her daily sojourns by bus. After an entire year, Simon gains a greater understanding of what it’s like for her sister to live in the world, and the experience brings them closer together.
The experience also helped Simon take the point of view of characters with disabilities and convey their inner thoughts and feelings credibly in The Story of Beautiful Girl. She tells Woodruff that just because a person with a disability isn’t able to express him or herself doesn’t mean they are unaware of how they are perceived:
I wanted to… show the world not just how the world treats them, but how they feel about how the world treats them.
Watch Story Sheds Light on Treatment of People With Disabilities on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
Simon’s book tour will be bringing her to nearby Worcester, Massachusetts, at the end of next month. She’ll be the keynote speaker for a conference at the DCU Center on Friday, March 23, at 9:00 a.m. Find her complete tour schedule here.
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Image by moonlightbulb (Selena N.B.H.), used under its Creative Commons license.