Mean little deaf queer A memoir

Terry Galloway

Book - 2009

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BIOGRAPHY/Galloway, Terry
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Subjects
Published
Boston, Mass. : Beacon Press 2009.
Language
English
Main Author
Terry Galloway (-)
Physical Description
xvii, 230 p. ; 23 cm
ISBN
9780807072905
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

Suffering fetal nervous system damage from an experimental antibiotic given her mother when she was six months pregnant, Galloway experienced hallucinations and developed compromised vision and deafness, then in her ninth year began feeling . . . changes to my own body that seemed as mysterious and inevitable to me as dying. Hampered with army-issue eyeglasses with lenses as thick as a cow's tongue and a box-sized hearing aid in a halter with wires snaking up to her ears, she thought herself a toad a tubby, moist, myopic croaker. A new persona as a tough, mean, little class clown expressed her frustration and fury in an era lacking the Americans with Disabilities Act, cell phones, texting, and theater of the deaf. Determined to work in theater but knowing she couldn't succeed on a professional stage, Gallagher performed in seedy playhouses and on makeshift stages yet experienced epiphany so intense that theater became religious devotion for her. Told with understandable rage, quirky humor, and extraordinary humanity, this remarkable woman's engaging account deserves a large readership.--Scott, Whitney Copyright 2009 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review

Owing to an antibiotic given to her mother during pregnancy, performance artist Galloway started going deaf and experiencing bizarre out-of-body experiences at age nine. Going from "normal" to disabled is jarring, and her new oversized hearing aids and thick glasses make her feel like a freak. Despite her disability, Galloway's strong personality, heightened sense of drama, and attraction to girls lead to an unconventional and barrier-busting story filled with sexual experimentation and a desire for a life lived at the extremes, all ably described in this compelling memoir. A good choice to strengthen disability, feminist, and gay studies collections, too.-Lauren Gilbert, Cold Spring Harbor Lib., NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A performance artist recounts the painful metamorphosis that warped her youth. Prior to age nine, the only characteristic distinguishing the author's childhood from that of countless other Texans was that much of it had been spent with her family in Berlin, where her Army father had been stationed. But that year, gradually and without warning, Galloway lost her hearing and found her vision severely impaired. She also began to experience out-of-body hallucinations. The first to discover the diminishment of her senses was her fourth-grade teacher, who noticed that the top-notch student who used to sit at the front of the class had begun to struggle when she was moved to the back. A battery of tests soon revealed both the severity of Galloway's hearing and vision problems and the causethe antibiotic mycin, which had been used to treat a severe kidney infection that her mother suffered during her pregnancy. Learning that the drug was already known to cause fetal complications at the time it was administered to her motheralong with the stories of other handicapped friends' traumatic birthscrippled Galloway. She was overcome with a "paranoid sense that every corner of the world has a mean streak" and experienced an "existential funk" she still wrestles with decades later. "The whole round world," she writes, "can feel like a single eye glaring at your flawed body asking the unanswerable of you in particular'Why ever should you matter?' " In addition to dealing with her "overwhelming loss of faith," the author also struggled with her sexual identity, finally coming to the realization that she was gay. Though institutionalized twice and close to committing suicide "eleven and a half" times, Galloway turned to performance, taking her needs for connection to the cabaret stage and now to the page. A frank, bitingly humorous memoir. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The year I turned nine, months before anyone knew I was going deaf, the voices of everyone I loved had all but disappeared. Their chatter had been like the nattering of birds in the trees--a cheerful if sometimes annoying reminder of how alive the world was around me. As their voices lapsed away, I no longer felt sure how any but the most common words sounded, how they ought to be pronounced, and that made me uneasy about opening my mouth. My place in the family that year was to watch, which was how I was learning to listen. I'd sit at the kitchen table--where most stories of any importance were told--and read lips, piecing together the shapes they formed until they made a kind of sense. Lip reading--whether you know you're doing it or not--is a hard, intimate business, and during my ninth year, when the way people sucked or licked their teeth as they were talking took sneaking precedence over the look in their eyes, all that rapt staring at mouths would wring me dry. After every couple of stories, I'd turn my gaze away, give myself a breather, and recharge. It took me so much concentrated effort to make sense, much less sentences, out of the lips as they moved, that any and every utterance had to have a payoff. If people were making idle conversation or empty yak about, say, grocery shopping or getting their nails done, I'd heave the sigh of the doomed and lean my head against the table, pressing the bridge of my nose against the metal rim hard enough to dig a furrow. I'd glance up every now and then to see if the topic had changed to something more interesting, like who had died and what had killed them. If talk was stalled at yellow versus white onions or the rising price of a pedicure, I'd get to pitying myself, slaving like a dung beetle over a worthless bit of nothing, and give up--put my head back down on the table, close my eyes, and deliberately lose control. The rising, falling mumble of those incomprehensible voices would wash over me until sounds would inexplicably leap from the muttering to shake themselves clear in my mind as words. A name, the time of night, the make of a car, a part of town, a tired old cliché. I'd string them together as randomly as I caught them, but they still always seemed to be telling me a story. Ruby, two a.m., Ford, east of Hutto, dying of hunger, and I'd see the black-eyed Great- Aunt Ruby I'd never met gunning her Mustang down the one main street of a hick Texas town en route to love or a Burger King. It soothed my hurt and anger to imagine all those arbitrary words telling me the illicit secrets behind everything I hadn't heard. Which may be why I now find myself enamored of the memoir. The good ones thrill me every bit as much as the great novels, but it's the crappy ones I've lost my heart to. They make me feel like a rescue dog, sniffing out the dim glimmerings of feelings sincere and raw within a tangled wreckage of inchoate ramblings and obvious lies. I've been reading a ton of bad ones lately, most of which I've gotten only halfway through. They are piled up by my bedside and not in the best of shape. I'm a passionate reader and the books have suffered for it, their covers wavy from having been dropped in the tub, spines busted from being tossed on the floor, pages folded, creased, coffee-stained, and marked with ink. Red. I feel intensely fond of the whole lot of lousy writing that has found its way to print because I smell in those stinkers a fecund democracy. Every sort of half-coherent loser getting their say. Maybe even mean little deaf queers like me. As a toddler I was an ardent chatterbox, with such an adult and rapid-fire vocabulary that one of our German neighbors in Stuttgart mistook me for a dwarf. By age seven I was becoming what passes in our family of energetic talkers as taciturn, more like my father, who would sneak away from the kitchen table in the middle of a detailed piece of family gossip my mother and my sister, Trudy, were sharing and flee to the bathroom so he could read the Sunday paper in peace. I never left the table. I just stopped talking. My mother and Trudy never worried about my growing silence--they'd taken it as appreciative. But then they didn't know the reasons behind it. Sounds had started disappearing all around me. I didn't know where to, and I didn't think to ask--not then and not the handful of years later when I started having my "visions." Or so I liked to call them, although they never clued me in to anything useful or remotely prophetic. Whatever they were, they were first visited upon me when I was nine and our family had resettled from Berlin, Germany, to Fort Hood, Texas. One hot spring Texas night I was sprawled on the dry grass of our new front yard, gazing up at a spiral of stars, when I suddenly found myself six feet in the air, looking down at myself lying on the grass looking up at those stars. I was a little pissed off by how perfectly cheerful my body seemed without me. These odd displacements weren't exactly a daily occurrence, but that year, they happened often enough to make themselves familiar. Once I went zooming to the ceiling of the school gym as if sucked up by a vacuum. I dangled there looking down on a scene that was small as a dollhouse, everything normal about it. My PE teacher blew herself red on her whistle while my six classmates and I, all of us looking a bit zaftig in our blue shorts and white snap blouses, thundered across the polished wooden floor. No one else seemed aware that while my body was stampeding along with the rest of the herd, I wasn't there at all. I'd become a much more delicate presence adrift in the rafters, smiling down on our sweaty race as if it were a mildly amusing bit of low comedy. Decades later in London, where I'd gone to perform one of my one-woman shows, I saw something of the same kind of life in miniature in a pennymechanical shop. A carved wooden man, not much bigger than my own thumb, was sleeping on a perfectly detailed cloth and wooden bed inside his tiny bedroom. He slept there until I dropped in a coin that clicked the switch that set it all in motion. With a ticking noise, the window of his minuscule room flew open and a dream horse, its nostrils and eyes painted to look as wild and flaring as its mane, poked its head through the gap. Up the little man sat, his closed doll eyes snapping wide with alarm as the horse reared and the wooden chair at the foot of the bed tilted and twirled. Watching that nightmare unfold in the little man's shoebox of a room awakened in me the same queasy prickle of enchantment I'd felt as a kid, looking down on a play-pretend world. Excerpted from Mean Little Deaf Queer: A Memoir by Terry Galloway All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.