12 Must-Read Books About Disability to Add to Your Reading List
Many people set goals for themselves at the start of a new year. For those who enjoy reading, we’ve created a list of some of our favorite disability-themed books. Most of the books on this list were written by disabled authors. They are also available in multiple formats, including ebook and audiobook.
Tip: If you don’t want to buy a title, check your local library for it! If they don’t have it, they may be able to do an interlibrary loan to get it for you. This is a great way to support both the author and your library.
Demystifying Disability: What to Know, What to Say, and How to be an Ally
Authored by Emily Ladau
Categories: Nonfiction, Self help
People with disabilities are the world’s largest minority, an estimated 15 percent of the global population. But many of us—disabled and nondisabled alike—don’t know how to act, what to say, or how to be an ally to the disability community. What are the appropriate ways to think, talk, and ask about disability? Authored by celebrated disability rights advocate, speaker, and writer Emily Ladau, this practical, intersectional guide offers all readers a welcoming place to understand disability as part of the human experience.
Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the 21st Century
Edited by Alice Wong
Categories: Nonfiction, essays
According to the last census, one in five people in the United States lives with a disability. Some are visible, some are hidden–but all are underrepresented in media and popular culture. Now, just in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, activist Alice Wong brings together an urgent, galvanizing collection of personal essays by contemporary disabled writers.
Places I’ve Taken My Body
Authored by Molly McCully Brown
Categories: Nonfiction, memoir, essays
In seventeen intimate essays, Molly McCully Brown explores living within and beyond the limits of a body—in her case one shaped since birth by cerebral palsy. These essays comprise a vivid travelogue set throughout the United States and Europe, from the rural American South of her childhood to the medieval streets of Bologna, Italy.
Two Girls Staring at the Ceiling
Authored by Lucy Frank
Categories: Fiction, young adult, poetry
Chess, the narrator, is sick, but with what exactly, she isn’t sure. And to make matters worse, she must share a hospital room with Shannon, her polar opposite. How these teenagers become friends, helping each other come to terms with their illness, makes for a dramatic and deeply moving read.
Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter
Authored by Kate Clifford Larson
Categories: Nonfiction, biography, historical
Joe and Rose Kennedy’s strikingly beautiful daughter Rosemary was intellectually disabled, a secret fiercely guarded by her powerful and glamorous family. In Rosemary, Kate Clifford Larson uses newly uncovered sources to bring Rosemary Kennedy’s story to light. Young Rosemary comes alive as a sweet, lively girl adored by her siblings. But Larson also reveals the often desperate and duplicitous arrangements the Kennedys made to keep her away from home as she became increasingly difficult in her early twenties, culminating in Joe’s decision to have Rosemary lobotomized at age twenty-three and the family’s complicity in keeping the secret.
Only years later did the Kennedy siblings begin to understand what had happened to Rosemary, which inspired them to direct government attention and resources to the plight of the developmentally and mentally disabled, transforming the lives of millions.
My Sister’s Keeper
Authored by Jodi Picoult
Categories: Fiction, contemporary
Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. By age thirteen, she has undergone countless surgeries, transfusions, and shots so that her older sister, Kate, can somehow fight the leukemia that has plagued her since childhood. The product of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, Anna was conceived as a bone marrow match for Kate—a life and a role that she has never challenged…until now. Like most teenagers, Anna is beginning to question who she truly is. But unlike most teenagers, she has always been defined in terms of her sister—and so Anna makes a decision that for most would be unthinkable, a decision that will tear her family apart and have perhaps fatal consequences for the sister she loves.
Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist
Authored by Kristen Joiner with Judith Heumann
Categories: Nonfiction, memoir
Paralyzed from polio at eighteen months, Judy’s struggle for equality began early in life. From fighting to attend grade school after being described as a “fire hazard” to later winning a lawsuit against the New York City school system for denying her a teacher’s license because of her paralysis, Judy’s actions set a precedent that fundamentally improved rights for disabled people.
As a young woman, Judy rolled her wheelchair through the doors of the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in San Francisco as a leader of the Section 504 Sit-In, the longest takeover of a governmental building in US history. Working with a community of over 150 disabled activists and allies, Judy successfully pressured the Carter administration to implement protections for disabled peoples’ rights, sparking a national movement and leading to the creation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Archer’s Voice
Authored by Mia Sheridan
Categories: Fiction, contemporary, romance
Until I trespass into his strange, silent, and isolated world, Archer communicates with no one. Yet in his whiskey-colored eyes, something intangible happens between us. There’s so much more to him than just his beauty, his presence, or the ways his hands communicate with me. On me. But this town is mired in secrets and betrayals, and Archer is the explosive center of it all.
So much passion. And so much hurt. But it’s only in Archer’s silence that we might just find what we need to heal . . . and live.
No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Morality
Authored by Michael J. Fox
Categories: Nonfiction, memoir
The entire world knows Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly, the teenage sidekick of Doc Brown in Back to the Future; as Alex P. Keaton in Family Ties; as Mike Flaherty in Spin City; and through numerous other movie roles and guest appearances on shows such as The Good Wife and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Diagnosed at age 29, Michael is equally engaged in Parkinson’s advocacy work, raising global awareness of the disease and helping find a cure through The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, the world’s leading non-profit funder of PD science. His two previous bestselling memoirs, Lucky Man and Always Looking Up, dealt with how he came to terms with the illness, all the while exhibiting his iconic optimism. His new memoir reassesses this outlook, as events in the past decade presented additional challenges.
Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design
Authored by Kat Holmes
Categories: Nonfiction, informative
Sometimes designed objects reject their users: a computer mouse that doesn’t work for left-handed people, for example, or a touchscreen payment system that only works for people who read English phrases, have 20/20 vision, and use a credit card. Something as simple as color choices can render a product unusable for millions. These mismatches are the building blocks of exclusion.
In Mismatch, Kat Holmes describes how design can lead to exclusion, and how design can also remedy exclusion. Inclusive design methods—designing objects with rather than for excluded users—can create elegant solutions that work well and benefit all. Holmes tells stories of pioneers of inclusive design, many of whom were drawn to work on inclusion because of their own experiences of exclusion.
The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs
Authored by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Categories: Nonfiction, essays
In The Future Is Disabled, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks some provocative questions: What if, in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled—and what if that’s not a bad thing? And what if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to creating a future in which it’s possible to survive fascism, climate change, and pandemics and to bring about liberation?
Written over the course of two years of disabled isolation during the pandemic, this is a book of love letters to other disabled QTBIPOC (and those concerned about disability justice, the care crisis, and surviving the apocalypse); honor songs for kin who are gone; recipes for survival; questions and real talk about care, organizing, disabled families, and kin networks and communities; and wild brown disabled femme joy in the face of death. With passion and power, The Future Is Disabled remembers our dead and insists on our future.
Out of My Mind
Authored by Sharon M. Draper
Categories: Fiction, middle grade
Eleven-year-old Melody is not like most people. She can’t walk, she can’t talk, and she can’t write. All because she has cerebral palsy. But she also has a photographic memory; she can remember every detail of everything she has ever experienced. She’s the smartest kid in her whole school, but NO ONE knows it. Most people—her teachers, her doctors, her classmates—dismiss her as mentally challenged because she can’t tell them otherwise. But Melody refuses to be defined by her disability. And she’s determined to let everyone know it…somehow.
There Can Never Be Too Many Books About Disability
This list only has a few of our favorites. There are so many other books out there about disability! What are some of your favorites? Will you be reading any of these this year?
by Abby Burch
Marketing & Communications Specialist
