One day in the summer of 2003 I found myself in a hotel lobby, engaged in an intense conversation with Andrew Solomon. His book on depression, “The Noonday Demon,” had won the National Book Award. Now he was working on a new project — about families with children who were so different from their parents that they called into question the very meaning of identity.
Solomon wanted to interview me because our daughter, Becky, has achondroplasia, the most common form of dwarfism. She had survived a rather harrowing infancy during which her too-small airways left her struggling for survival. She needed a tracheotomy, oxygen tanks and home nursing until she was nearly 3 years old …
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I’ll read the book. It’s interesting – people judge so much by externals. Here at my agency, I have buttons for people to wear that say, ‘I Have Low Vision’, so when a visually impaired person goes to a public place they don’t have to engage in long discussions about not being able to SEE the specials board, or about why they don’t just look at the posted notice about return policies, or want to use the special voting machine – only to be greeted by the universal remark, “You don’t LOOK blind!”. While many others who fit the stereotype of how a person who can’t see ‘looks’ often have better vision than those who don’t.