I Live a Life Like Yours

'Compelling, unconventional. Genius' Michael J. Fox, New York Times

'Up-ends received wisdom about disability, testifies to an uncrushable spirit and an ordinary, extraordinary family... Revolutionary' David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas

'A profound, contemplative work' New Statesman

'A powerful examination... a wonderful memoir' Independent

Jan Grue was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy at the age of three, along with the assumption that his life would be narrow and limited. In I Live a Life Like Yours, he confronts this spectacular failure to anticipate the life that he lives now - as a husband, a father, a professor - and sets out to forge a radical new way to tell his story.

FURTHER PRAISE FOR I LIVE A LIFE LIKE YOURS

'Stunning... restrained, dazzlingly intelligent' Observer

'A quietly brilliant book that warms slowly in the hands. Artful' New York Times

'This is a voice that has found inventive ways to imagine and frame disability and difference' Raymond Antrobus, author of All the Names Given

'Sensitive and beautiful... Jan tells the story of how he came to his own understanding with exactness and poetry' Jarred McGinnis, author of The Coward

'Quietly but insistently radical, a book which demands space and leaves change behind' Jessie Greengrass, author of Sight and The High House

'A gift to read' Sunaura Taylor, author of Beasts of Burden

'All of us, whether we consider ourselves disabled or nondisabled, will understand more full what it means to be human if we accompany Jan Grue in his rich travels' Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, author of Extraordinary Bodies

'An elegant meditation... a tart and spare palate cleanser' Vulture

Auteur

JAN GRUE was born in 1981 in Oslo. The author of a wide-rangin 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.

Texte du rabat

'Superb... up-ends received wisdom about disability... Humbling, dark, bright, defiant, generous... revolutionary' David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas

A profoundly beautiful memoir about disability, difference, and living as a vulnerable body

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.