Elegy For A Disease A Personal & Cultura

During the first half of the twentieth century, epidemics of polio caused fear and panic, killing some who contracted the disease, leaving others with varying degrees of paralysis. The defeat of polio became a symbol of modern technology's ability to reduce human suffering. But while the story of polio may have seemed to end on April 12, 1956, when the Salk vaccine was declared a success, millions of people worldwide are polio survivors.

In this dazzling memoir, Anne Finger interweaves her personal experience with polio with a social and cultural history of the disease. Anne contracted polio as a very young child, just a few months before the Salk vaccine became widely available. After six months of hospitalization, she returned to her family's home in upstate New York, using braces and crutches. In her memoir, she writes about the physical expansiveness of her childhood, about medical attempts to "fix" her body, about family violence, job discrimination, and a life rich with political activism, writing, and motherhood.

She also writes an autobiography of the disease, describing how it came to widespread public attention during a 1916 epidemic in New York in which immigrants, especially Italian immigrants, were scapegoated as being the vectors of the disease. She relates the key roles that Franklin Roosevelt played in constructing polio as a disease that could be overcome with hard work, as well as his ties to the nascent March of Dimes, the prototype of the modern charity. Along the way, we meet the formidable Sister Kenny, the Australian nurse who claimed to have found a revolutionary treatment for polio and who was one of the most admired women in America at mid-century; a group of polio survivors who formed the League of the Physically Handicapped to agitate for an end to disability discrimination in Depression-era relief projects; and the founders of the early disability-rights movement, many of them polio survivors who, having been raised to overcome obstacles and triumph over their disabilities, confronted a world filled with barriers and impediments that no amount of hard work could overcome.

Anne Finger writes with the candor and the skill of a novelist, and shows not only how polio shaped her life, but how it shaped American cultural experience as well.

“Readers will find themselves caught up in a disabled womans coming to terms with herself, her dysfunctional family and society. This unsentimental, grippingly told story will captivate readers and sensitive them to the world of the disabled.”

—Library Journal

 

“Anne Finger creates a lyric prose that shimmers like a serious dream. Both public and private stories concern her narrator's quest for the truth about disabled lives. This is a memoir of history and imagination and it belongs on every book shelf.”

— Stephen Kuusisto, Professor of Disability Studies, The Ohio State University and author of Planet of the Blind

 

“An informative and rewarding narrative of living with a disability…”

—Kirkus

 

“…skillful prose…evocative and often poetic…a nuanced history.”

—Publishers Weekly

The author interweaves her personal story of polio and the everyday experience of disability with the history of the disease, detailing her own affliction at the age of three, just before the Salk vaccine became widely available, her childhood in upper New York State, medical efforts to "fix" her disabilities, her success at leading a productive life, and the ways polio has shaped her life. 15,000 first printing.

"What happened to your leg?" he asks me as he's loading the groceries into the trunk of my Volvo.

"I had polio."

"What's that?"

I feel like an aging movie star who's been asked her name by a restaurant maître d'. Polio was as famous as AIDS. Those of us who had it were figures. We limped around under its metaphoric weight.

---from Elegy for a Disease

 

Advance Praise for Elegy for a Disease

"Anne Finger creates a lyric prose that shimmers like a serious dream. Both public and private stories concern her narrator's quest for the truth about disabled lives. This is a memoir of history and imagination, and it belongs on every book shelf."

---Stephen Kuusisto, professor of disability studies, The Ohio State University, and author of Planet of the Blind

 

Praise for Bone Truth

"Lyrical, searing prose that evokes the strength, influence, and fragility of memory. Funny, stirring, tender, true."

---Kirkus Reviews

 

Praise for Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy and Birth

 

"A thoughtful reflection on the meaning of health in a society that is coming to value wellness above all else; and a terrifically told story by a crackerjack writer...A positive, life-affirming work."

---The Vancouver Sun

 

"An electrifying odyssey...A stunning exploration of the metaphor of health in society...A powerful story."

---San Francisco Chronicle

Anne Finger has taught creative writing at Wayne State University in Detroit and at the University of Texas at Austin and is the author of a collection of short stories, an autobiographical essay, and a novel. She was the president of the Society for Disability Studies and continues to be active in the disability rights movement. She lives in Oakland, California.