I Live a Life Like Yours

Jan Grue [Pushkin Press]

‘This is not a story about survival. It is not about how I became a human, but rather how I came to understand that I already was human… This is an attempt to write off the language of others… I began writing because I needed a language different from the one available to me.’

Diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy at the tender age of three, award-winning Norwegian author, Jan Grue asserts in this stunning autobiographical contemplation on inhabiting a vulnerable body that ‘I Live a Life Like Yours’.

Via a delicate, fractured chronology – between a childhood spent in a red house with a ramp in Norway with his sister and quietly dedicated parents; scholarly sojourns in Berkeley, St. Petersburg, and Amsterdam, with all the challenges of accessibility and self-realization he met there; and life now, as an academic, husband and father – Grue reflects on what it is to be privileged, different, seen or unseen: in short, on what it is to be human.

Not only a personal reflection, but also an examination of the world at large and how to inhabit it, this is a story with concerns as deep and wide as the matrix of social structures in which we exist, disability, love, loss, and the body in all its vulnerability, both in and out of a wheelchair.

In short, essayistic sections Grue introduces us to family, friends, and places, as well as allies and adversaries he has met along the way: his wife and child, whom he adores and who embody the life he might never have had; writers Joan Didion and Michael Foucault; administrators of universities who refuse to accept his double identity as ‘disabled’ and foreign student; his parents, endlessly advocating on his behalf in conversation with medics and authorities; and doctors whose voices remain in the cold clinical language of medical records that reduce the boy he once was to a body defined by its perceived shortcomings. We follow Grue, or rather, travel alongside him, as he comes to terms with the body he has; finds his own ways to inhabit the world; accepts his limitations and realizes new opportunities. He lives differently, but is no less alive.

Poetically rendered and thoughtfully selfaware, this quiet autobiographical masterpiece is not only an expression of struggle – though hardship is to be found here – but also a championing of hope and determination despite (and because of) despair and dismissal. With his sensitive, philosophical prose, Grue invites us to imagine with him a society in which vulnerability is a strength, and disability welcomed, rather than tolerated or simply ignored. Like Grue’s own body, this a body of text which finds new ways to open doors. In reading, we pass through them changed, more aware of vulnerability, and, ultimately, less afraid. HC

With his sensitive, philosophical prose, Grue invites us to imagine with him a society in which vulnerability is a strength.