‘Ugly’ author urges honesty
Be open about our physical differences, writer says
Robert Hoge looks out at the crowd of 400 children. He’s already taught them how people say hello in his native Australia — that’s g’day, for those not in the know.
He’s graciously shown his new friends the two metal poles that form the lower half of his left leg, and he’s waited patiently as the kids have stood up, leaned over, craned their necks — or all three — determined to see for themselves. Now he’s moving on to bigger things.
“You’ve got to be really honest, OK? Can you be honest?” Hoge asks the third-, fourth- and fifthgraders at Owen Elementary in Naperville, Ill. “Yes!” “Put up your hand if you think I look normal,” Hoge says. A third of the hands in the room go up. “Put your hand up if you think I look beautiful.” Half the hands go up. “You’re wonderful children,” Hoge says with a chuckle. “OK, who hasn’t put their hand up? Again, no wrong answers, who thinks I look ugly?” Utter stillness. And then slowly, hesitantly, three brave children raise their hands.
“Hey! No!” a few of their classmates protest.
“No, that’s OK,” Hoge says, gently but firmly. “There are no wrong answers.”
The self-described “ugliest person you’ve never met,” Hoge, 44, was born with short, twisted legs and a big tumor in the middle of his face. He has a broad, short nose constructed from one of his toes, and, as he makes clear in his powerful new memoir for kids, “Ugly,” he’s no stranger to childhood cruelty. But as he embarks on his U.S. book tour, his anti-bullying message isn’t the soothing “we’re all the same on the inside” that adults have come to expect.
“Too often, we try to say to kids that differences in appearances don’t matter, by pretending they don’t exist,” Hoge says.
“I want to give them the impression that it’s OK: It should actually be OK to say people look different from each other. I don’t think it’s possible to have people accept differences in appearance if we can’t at least acknowledge them. So the first thing (I want kids to know) is, it’s OK that we look a bit different from each other, and let’s not pretend we don’t.”
Dressed casually, in a plaid shirt, tan pants and work boots, Hoge easily commands the crowd of cross-legged kids, and when he recites a list of nicknames (toothpick legs, stumpy, cripple) he endured as a boy, he does so with a reassuring touch of dry humor: “I got called ugly face, which was, again, you know, not particularly creative.”
When a kid asks an unexpected question — “Did you like Team USA?” — he leans forward with a quizzical smile and lobs that trick shot right back over the net: “I love being in the USA. I don’t like when the USA beats us in the Olympics, especially the swimming, but Michael Phelps is retiring now, so that’s good. Someone else can have a go for a while.”
This is all great fun, of course, but it’s fun with a deeper meaning.
“I don’t want to sit there and lecture (kids), but I think there’s some value to kids who are having a rough time, who might be bullied or teased, in seeing someone up there that they can relate to,” Hoge says.
“They can see that there’s someone who’s (had a tough time) and that they’ve made it. I don’t think there’s any one answer to bullying, but there’s a lot of value to giving kids hope by talking honestly.”
Hoge, who lives in Brisbane, is married and has two daughters and a cat named Leo. A memoir he wrote for adults came out in 2013 in Australia and New Zealand, and after that, he was often invited to speak to kids. His publisher suggested writing a memoir for children, and Hoge, a former newspaper reporter, embraced the challenge. “Ugly,” which got a starred review from Publishers Weekly, was released in the U.S. this month.
Hoge writes about how unusual he looked when he was born, with a tumor pushing his eyes to the sides of his head. There were more than two dozen operations, including a life-threatening 12-hour marathon at age 4, in which doctors moved his eyes in toward his nose, amputated part of his right leg, and rebuilt his nose from toe bone and cartilage in his amputated foot.
There were terrible taunts, the worst of which was “Toe Nose,” he writes: “It cut to the very heart of me, making me ashamed of the good work the doctors had done.”
But there was also a very loving and supportive family and a childhood rich in ordinary adventure. We see young Robert making his first friend at school, learning to ride a bike and making mischief with neighborhood pals. You fear for him as he enters school, a child with wobbly legs and an unusual face, but over time, you come to fear for those who stand in his way too. He’s funny, he’s whipsmart, he’s brave. He seems, well, kind of unstoppable.
“I’m probably aggressively positive,” Hoge says with a twinkle in his eye. “Which is sometimes to my detriment and probably means I’m not always as sympathetic as I should be.”
On a more serious note, he adds: “I wanted to have a balance in the book of being extraordinarily frank about my circumstances, all the surgeries I had and some of the consequences of that, what it meant in my life, but also reflecting that, despite — and perhaps because of — my circumstances, I had a pretty good childhood. I had a lot of fun growing up.”