Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Specialneeds

The first collection of literary writing on raising a child with special needs, Love You to Pieces features families coping with autism, deafness, muscular dystrophy, Down syndrome and more. Here, poets, memoirists, and fiction writers paint beautiful, wrenchingly honest portraits of caring for their children, laying bare the moments of rage, disappointment, and guilt that can color their relationships. Parent-child communication can be a challenge at the best of times, but in this collection we witness the struggles and triumphs of those who speak their own language—or dont speak at all—and those who love them deeply.

“Powerful, unflinching, and beautifully rendered, Love You to Pieces is not just an anthology about raising children with special needs, but true literature. Many parents will find moving depictions of a reality they know so well. Others with no knowledge of this world will find a literary experience they'll never forget.” —Rachel Simon, author of Riding the Bus with My Sister

“Love You To Pieces is a unique reading experience: raw, moving, provocative and compelling. The stories are beautifully told, from many different backgrounds and perspectives, but taken together share a common and ultimately triumphant connecting thread: love conquers all.” —Daniel Tammet, author of Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant

"Love You To Pieces is groundbreaking. Our public discourse about disability is dominated by the voices of medical professionals and fix-your-child tomes. These stories elevate the experience of people with disabilities to the level of literature. Love You To Pieces bears witness to cognitive and physical difference as an essential and beautiful fact of human experience. It is a must buy book for anyone who parents, educates, or supports young people with disabilities." —Jonathan Mooney, author of The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal

Suzanne Kamata is fiction editor at the online magazine Literary Mama. Her essays, stories, and articles on parenting a disabled child - her daughter is deaf and has cerebral palsy — have appeared or will appear in Utne Reader; Brain, Child; Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined; It's a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters; and an anthology on new family configurations to be published by Riverhead in 2007. Her anthology The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan was nominated for the Kiriyama Prize. Her work has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize, and her essay "The Sound and the Worry" was given a special mention in the latest Pushcart Prize anthology.