I Live a Life Like Yours: A Memoir

Description

Jan Grue had just become a father when he inherited a stack of his childhood medical records. Following a diagnosis of spinal muscular atrophy at the age of three, the raft of doctors' notes, clinical descriptions and case histories defined his body as defective and his future as bleak and limited. They conjured a childhood nothing like the one he remembered, that failed to anticipate the life he lived now. I Live a Life Like Yours is Grue's beautiful, groundbreaking search for a literary language that could better tell his story. Writing with clear-eyed wisdom and bracing frankness, Grue folds insights from art, film and literature into an expansive account of who he was expected to be, and who he became. If it is a story of frustration with negligent institutions and the pain of stigma, it is also a story of the potential of acceptance and the gift of family. Unflinching, yet always compassionate, I Live a Life Like Yours is a fierce and tender reckoning with what it means to live as a vulnerable body. 'Jan Grue's superb book encompasses memoir, ideas and travel. It up-ends received wisdom about disability. It testifies to an uncrushable spirit and an ordinary, extraordinary family. It is humbling, dark, bright, defiant, smart, generous and - in its courteous Norwegian way - revolutionary' - David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas 'A narrative that is compelling, unconventional and powerfully told... His genius becomes evident in his mastery of language.' - Michael J. Fox

JAN GRUE was born in 1981 in Oslo. The author of a wide-ranging body of work in fiction, nonfiction, children's books, and academic literature, he is also Professor of Qualitative Research at the University of Oslo. I Live a Life Like Yours was published in Norway in 2018 and has been hailed as a major milestone in Norwegian non-fiction. It is the first Norwegian non-fiction book to be nominated for the Nordic Council's Literature Prize in 50 years.

'Jan Grue's superb book encompasses memoir, ideas and travel. It up-ends received wisdom about disability. It testifies to an uncrushable spirit and an ordinary, extraordinary family. It is humbling, dark, bright, defiant, smart, generous and - in its courteous Norwegian way - revolutionary' - David Mitchell, author of 'Cloud Atlas' 'A narrative that is compelling, unconventional and powerfully told... His genius becomes evident in his mastery of language' - Michael J. Fox 'Grue is not in the defensive position of justifying his existence as a disabled body but instead he is engaged in a rich investigation of the (medical, intellectual and emotional) language of his past and how it has shaped his sense of self. This is a voice that has found inventive ways to imagine and frame disability and difference' - Raymond Antrobus, author of the Rathbones Folio Prize Winner 'The Perseverance' 'This sensitive and beautiful book is full of understanding of the relationships we have with ourselves, our bodies, our loved ones and the society which surrounds us. Jan tells the story of how he came to his own understanding with exactness and poetry' - Jarred McGinnis, author of 'The Coward' 'Stunning... a restrained, dazzlingly intelligent and self-excavating examination of what it has meant to be disabled and visibly different... a meditation on what it is to be human, what it is to be lonely and full of hope and yearning... 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 copying out the book verbatim... It makes you read carefully and think feelingly and I'm grateful that it is now in my head and heart, working change' - Observer 'A restrained, dazzlingly intelligent and self-excavating examination of what it has meant to be disabled and visibly different' - Guardian