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maggie1025's review against another edition
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
4.25
disabledbookdragon's review against another edition
informative
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
ren_the_hobbit's review against another edition
This is definitely from the viewpoint of an older white man
sondosia's review against another edition
3.0
I was really excited to read this book. It's relatively rare to find writing about disability from the perspective of people with disabilities, and this book covers a topic I've never read an entire book about: relationships between people with disabilities and their non-disabled partners.
However, this book turned out to be an enigma. Despite the fact that he is a professional journalist, Ben Mattlin is...not a good interviewer. At least, not in this context. There is simply too much of him in the text, by which I mean that even apart from the chapter he dedicates to discussing his own marriage, the entire book is peppered with his reactions to every interview response uttered by his interviewees, and these responses are often skeptical and sometimes downright condescending. He relates just about everything to his own experience, often in an envious or disbelieving way. The most egregious example of this happens in the last chapter, which is an extremely touching portrait of a (non-disabled) woman reflecting on her late husband, who was a prominent disability activist and a quadriplegic. Mattlin becomes so jealous of the man as he's described by his wife that he ultimately dismisses this as "the reminiscences of a widow wearing rose-colored glasses." Yikes. YIKES.
(And it's not like Mattlin lacks for venues in which to discuss his own life and thoughts and feelings! He has also published a memoir.)
Mattlin seems to literally approach each interview with a predisposition to disbelief and challenge everything he's told. When he hears positive things he's (as he himself describes it) "skeptical"; when he hears negative things he seems to assume that his interviewees are insufficiently woke and have internalized ableism. Many of his questions start with "But--," "Don't you--," and so on.
It would probably be an appropriate way to interview, for instance, a Trump White House official. It's a downright bizarre and insensitive way to interview people with disabilities and their partners about their own experiences.
Maybe he's concerned that he's getting sugarcoated responses. Sure, but that's a problem familiar to every beginner journalist. You're supposed to establish trust with your interviewees so that they feel comfortable speaking openly. At first I thought that perhaps he just couldn't find enough people who are sufficiently comfortable with that, but at the end he mentions that he had so many volunteers he had to turn many of them down!
This Washington Post review pretty much sums up many of my thoughts on this frustrating book: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-perils-and-pleasures-of-inter-abled-romance/2018/02/09/5a861e1a-0066-11e8-bb03-722769454f82_story.html?utm_term=.8b01273d6cbc
I think that if you can ignore Mattlin's often totally-unnecessary commentary, this book is worth a read because the people he profiles are so thoughtful and honest. But still, yikes.
However, this book turned out to be an enigma. Despite the fact that he is a professional journalist, Ben Mattlin is...not a good interviewer. At least, not in this context. There is simply too much of him in the text, by which I mean that even apart from the chapter he dedicates to discussing his own marriage, the entire book is peppered with his reactions to every interview response uttered by his interviewees, and these responses are often skeptical and sometimes downright condescending. He relates just about everything to his own experience, often in an envious or disbelieving way. The most egregious example of this happens in the last chapter, which is an extremely touching portrait of a (non-disabled) woman reflecting on her late husband, who was a prominent disability activist and a quadriplegic. Mattlin becomes so jealous of the man as he's described by his wife that he ultimately dismisses this as "the reminiscences of a widow wearing rose-colored glasses." Yikes. YIKES.
(And it's not like Mattlin lacks for venues in which to discuss his own life and thoughts and feelings! He has also published a memoir.)
Mattlin seems to literally approach each interview with a predisposition to disbelief and challenge everything he's told. When he hears positive things he's (as he himself describes it) "skeptical"; when he hears negative things he seems to assume that his interviewees are insufficiently woke and have internalized ableism. Many of his questions start with "But--," "Don't you--," and so on.
It would probably be an appropriate way to interview, for instance, a Trump White House official. It's a downright bizarre and insensitive way to interview people with disabilities and their partners about their own experiences.
Maybe he's concerned that he's getting sugarcoated responses. Sure, but that's a problem familiar to every beginner journalist. You're supposed to establish trust with your interviewees so that they feel comfortable speaking openly. At first I thought that perhaps he just couldn't find enough people who are sufficiently comfortable with that, but at the end he mentions that he had so many volunteers he had to turn many of them down!
This Washington Post review pretty much sums up many of my thoughts on this frustrating book: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-perils-and-pleasures-of-inter-abled-romance/2018/02/09/5a861e1a-0066-11e8-bb03-722769454f82_story.html?utm_term=.8b01273d6cbc
I think that if you can ignore Mattlin's often totally-unnecessary commentary, this book is worth a read because the people he profiles are so thoughtful and honest. But still, yikes.
dramaqueentears's review against another edition
3.0
Mattlin shares the stories of interabled couples that he meets through interviews. Most of the stories have a common theme: that interabled relationships tend to be closer and more dynamic than relationships between able bodied couples. Throughout some of the interviews, he polices the language of how disabled people view their own disabilities and makes some incredibly insensitive statements about young people with disabilities, stating that young people aren’t concerned nowadays with disability activism but only if they’ll ever find someone to have sex with. His interviews also tended to highlight wealthy professionals with disabilities, leaving a void for accounts of the majority of the disabled population that struggles to have accessible living spaces, let alone paid attendants. I don’t believe this book was a fair representation of what interabled romance truly looks like for the majority of us.
colleenish's review against another edition
3.0
This was a quick, interesting need. As much as I work with people who have disabilities, there's much I'm not aware of and prejedices I haven't unpacked.
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