I Live a Life Like Yours

The 'revolutionary' (David Mitchell), profoundly beautiful memoir about living as a vulnerablebody that rewrites our understanding of disability, desire and family.

Jan Grue had just become a father when he inherited a stack of his childhood medical records. Following a diagnosis of spinal muscular atrophy at the age of three, the raft of doctors' notes, clinical descriptions and case histories defined his body as defective and his future as bleak and limited. They conjured a childhood nothing like the one he remembered, that failed to anticipate the life he lived now. I Live a Life Like Yours is Grue's beautiful, groundbreaking search for a literary language that could better tell his story. Writing with clear-eyed wisdom and bracing frankness, Grue folds insights from art, film and literature into an expansive account of who he was expected to be, and who he became. If it is a story of frustration with negligent institutions and the pain of stigma, it is also a story of the potential of acceptance and the gift of family. Unflinching, yet always compassionate, I Live a Life Like Yours is a fierce and tender reckoning with what it means to live as a vulnerable body.

Autorentext
JAN GRUE was born in 1981 in Oslo. The author of a wide-ranging body of work in fiction, nonfiction, children's books, and academic literature, he is also Professor of Sociology at the University of Oslo. I Live a Life Like Yours was published in Norway in 2018 and has been hailed as a major milestone in Norwegian non-fiction. It is the first Norwegian non-fiction book to be nominated for the Nordic Council's Literature Prize in 50 years.