Thoughts on having MCs with disabilities

What are your thoughts on having more books that feature characters with disabilities? I, for one, often struggle with trying to find books that have these types of characters, especially ones with hearing disabilities. I've noticed that authors often stray away from the fact that there are disabilities in this world, and that there are people who struggle with them. It would be lovely to see an uptake in books that have characters with disabilities. It's a category that is often left untouched. What are your thoughts on having more books with disabled MCs?

Before an author can write meaningfully about living with disabilities, s/he needs to have experienced it. Either by being disabled, or living with a disabled partner/sibling/child ... There is no point in somebody who doesn't know about living with disability deciding to habe a disabled main character.

>2 MarthaJeanne: Not necessarily. An author could just as easily reach out to someone for resources to write on the subject.

There was another thread recently along these same lines…
Was it about superheroes with disabilities?

>4 2wonderY: I don't believe so, I could be wrong though. I'm just trying to gain input on a topic that's close to my heart. (I live with a disability, so I'm trying to hear other readers' opinions on this subject.)

>5 -Niko-: It would have been before you joined LT. I was hoping to jog others memories so we could re-visit that conversation for examples.

>6 2wonderY: True.

>3 -Niko-: For side characters, yes. But I doubt that it would be realistic for a main character. New authors are always being told, "Write what you know." So, while I would like characters to see and interact with more people using walkers in the city, I don'y really expect to see main characters using them.

>4 2wonderY: There was this thread about readers and characters with disabilities: https://www.librarything.com/topic/366399. In it I mentioned the Disability Book Archive, “a literature archive curated by the disabled community,” which might be of interest.

>9 Charon07: I have previously looked at the links before. Thank you, though!

>10 -Niko-: I should also say that I’d welcome more MCs with disabilities! Reading helps us see the world through other eyes, so more diversity of perspective is always welcome.

Flowers for Algernon is a classic, published in 1966.
The Speed of Dark is much more recent. Both are excellent.

>11 Charon07: Absolutely! Thank you for mentioning that. What I've noticed happening is that people often just look at the disability, not the person. Having more books that are positioned from a disabled MC's eyes could help people WITHOUT disabilities ultimately start treating others the same way. While I don't believe this will ever fully happen, I hope that in some way, shape, or form, we can at least make a lasting mark on society positively.

I've had too many books to drop because they felt like disability porn. Voyeuristic and meant to raise emotions like pity or "inspirational!" where the disabled person is more of a McGuffin/prop than anything.

I feel like parents of disabled children and those who don't have disability close by are the worst offenders. (In the autism community, the term is "autism moms" - for any adult caretaker who makes speaking for and over their autistic charge part of their identity, often with a sense of how they sacrifice.)

My general impression is that it's gotten better since the We Need Diverse Books and #OwnVoices community activist efforts.

Especially in sff, I've noticed a lot more disability showing up as just another thing about people, like hair color or whether they prefer tea or coffee. When you have fantasy creatures or aliens who have different physical needs, I guess it's easy enough to carry that on to humans, too.

A series I was reading recently but abandoned for other reasons features two disabled POV characters: Ancestral Night's MC has PTSD and a fairly severe anxiety disorder, while Machine's MC suffers chronic pain and uses an exoskeleton.

Mail-Order Magic is a recent short story by Stephanie Burgis, found at the Sunday Morning Transport. link - Hailey, the MC, has ME/CFS. I am especially fond of the story because ME/CFS is my primary disability these days, but it's also just cozy and sweet. (full disclosure, i guess? it was Steph talking on twitter about her own ME on the awareness day in 2021 that was the final puzzle piece in me figuring out what was going on and led to diagnosis.)

Oh, and just thought of another - One for All is a gender-swapped Three Musketeers retelling where the POV character has POTS. Lillie Lainoff, too, has POTS and fences, so she based some of that on her own experiences. (@alyxis, this one is YA, so you might really like it!)

>14 keristars: First off, I just want to say thank you for taking the time to respond. Not many people are comfortable talking about this type of topic, especially regarding disabilities.

I've never heard of ME/CFS, and would you mind explaining it from your perspective? I'm all about having others' point of view on their disability, as I struggle with my own.

It's definitely important to touch on the subject of caretakers and guardians speaking on behalf of those with disabilities. It doesn't matter if you are a guardian or what, let disabled people speak their minds. Thanks for bringing that up.

It's sad and overall frustrating as someone with a disability watching how many people are uneducated on the disabilities out there. I've stood by and watched as many I know try to explain their disability to others, only to be looked at differently and often alienated. Not a fun feeling.

Thanks for the book recs! I'll definitely look into them and hopefully spread them around.

>15 -Niko-: ME/CFS is myalgic encephalomyelits/chronic fatigue syndrome. the CFS part leads to confusion, and can be a symptom of other illness, so lots of us prefer to use ME/CFS or ME. It's not very widely known, even though millions of people have it. Huge numbers have it without knowing, too, because doctors don't know how to diagnose it, or assume it's psychological.

Basically, it's exertion intolerance. We get tired a lot faster from normal activity than healthy people, take longer to recover, and have what's called PEM or PESE. Post-Exertional Malaise or Symptom Exacerbation.

PEM is *the* hallmark of ME/CFS. It can hit right after exertion, or days later, and it can last anything from hours to weeks to years (especially if you are unable to adequately rest to recover from it!). It's excess tiredness, as well as flu-like symptoms, pain, weakness, brainfog, worsening of other illness symptoms... and it can be different for everyone! It can also change over time. The first few years I was sick, I would sleep upwards of 20 hours at a time and couldn't tolerate tv or music, and very little reading. I still sleep a lot, but not for quite such long stretches, and my biggest PEM symptom is weakness. If I'm not in a PEM crash, I can walk around my apartment fine. But when it hits, I can barely take the 2 steps out of bed to my wheelchair, because my legs just won't hold me up. (Lots of other stuff, too, but that's a biggie.)

Exertion, by the way, means doing anything! Anything that uses energy counts, whether it's autonomic processes like digestion or breathing, or mental like sensory processing, or usual stuff like movement. The primary way dealing with ME is to reduce exertion to what you can tolerate without triggering a PEM crash, and over time hope "what you can tolerate" includes more activity.

I haven't been able to use a regular computer (laptop or desktop) since I got sick, because it's too fatiguing to try to focus on such a large screen. Even my tablet is too big for anything but short sessions or watching tv. But I'm pretty lucky that I can read a lot without too much fatigue, as long as I'm using my kindle paperwhite. Some of the people in my support network haven't been able to read books in years, not even audiobooks.

I'm always ready to go into great detail about ME/CFS because it's usually a post-viral illness. I had something like the flu in Dec 19/Jan 2020, which is probably what triggered it in me. When you hear about "Long Covid", a LOT of it is ME/CFS resulting from covid. So do what you can to avoid getting sick, and if you're unusually tired even months after being sick, and are noticing other odd symptoms, you really want to know ASAP if it's ME so you can implement pacing and not try to push through it. Trying to do more even when you're tired is the WORST thing you can do if you have ME.

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I've been trying to think of books I've read with Deaf characters for you, but I'm blanking on most of the titles.

The Tithenai Chronicles by Foz Meadows is an adult duology that features a few disabled characters. One is unable to speak with his mouth, but is not Deaf. Kind of like Bernardo from the Zorro tv series, he pretends to be Deaf to act as a spy. He uses sign language, as do his friends. I liked the books, but found them difficult to read because of the violence and political plots, but ymmv.

At least there are tags and tagmash to find what I'm looking for. :) P. S. I Love You is a time-travel romance novel where the hero is partially deaf, and the heroine (from the 21st century) knows ASL, so is able to teach the 1840s people to use it. I'm not at all sure how the rep is, but I enjoyed the time-travel romance part.

Books (I have read) with Deaf/HOH characters:

True Biz
The Sign for Home
The Silence Between Us
Marvel's character Echo is Deaf.
Annie's Song, Anderson -- romance
Never Seduce a Scot -- romance
The Stand, King
Eloquent Silence -- romance

If the option is between having 100 books with disabled main characters, where 5 are written by disabled authors and 95 by authors who did research and consulted with people with disabilities, or between having only the 5 by disabled authors, I would far rather have 100 books.

Sure, we say 'write what you know', but who among us knows about dragons, or aliens, or time travel, or any of the things speculative fiction is written about? No one who writes historical fiction (or nonfiction for that matter) beyond a few decades is writing from personal experience; they do research. For that matter, fiction itself is about creating something that you don't have personal experience of. Sure, you might write a main character who has the same job or place of origin or hobby as you, but if the whole book was only your personal experience, it would be an autobiography, not fiction.

There are ways to write disabled characters wrong or disrespectfully, but I don't think that means that all abled writers should be banned or even discouraged from making their main character disabled.

The points of a writer with no disability writing about disability are the same reasons anyone writes any fiction, or any nonfiction about a topic they don't have direct, personal experience of. We write to learn, to explore viewpoints other than our own, to connect with others. What is so terrible about that including a disability the author doesn't have?

>18 GraceCollection: There are ways to write disabled characters wrong or disrespectfully, but I don't think that means that all abled writers should be banned or even discouraged from making their main character disabled.

Please forgive me if I missed a reply that argues for this, but... this seems like a very unreasonable position?

It is good to have more diversity in who is represented in books, so yes, people who aren't currently disabled should include disabled characters.

It's a real problem, though, that disabled characters are so often present in service to other characters' arcs as a challenge to overcome or to be inspirational, rather than whole people. Al Capone Does My Shirts is an example off the top of my head - I enjoyed the book when I read it, but I was eager for any representation of autism, at the time. A lot of autistics who have read the book think the pov character's sister is exactly the kind of lesson/inspiration prop that's problematic. I felt that way about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - sure, it's great to have an autistic pov character, but it felt voyeuristic and based too strongly on stereotypes in service of Haddon's mystery concept, not what it's really like to be autistic.

When you don't have a particular disability, it's only too easy to fall into those traps because you just don't know they're there to fall into. (But there are sensitivity readers to help during edits! Sensitivity readers are out there for any marginalized identity, because they want to help authors include better representation, rather that no representation.)

On a related note, I read What Katy Did for the first time last year, and was surprised by how relatable the chapters about her disability were! Through my own experience, and understanding the 1868 context of what was expected from girls and women, I thought it was all very realistic and reasonable. But most of what I've heard about how it promotes bad disability rep and disability as a punishment for headstrong behavior/disobedience has come from people who hadn't had the experience of being bedbound. (It's possibly the best example of disability in 19th century children's fiction that I've seen thus far, though Bessie at the Sea-Shore from 1867 is pretty ok, too, with a vet who lost his foot in war, and a boy who fell off a ladder and needs a wheelchair.)

>19 keristars: My comment was a reply to comments like, 'Before an author can write meaningfully about living with disabilities, s/he needs to have experienced it. Either by being disabled, or living with a disabled partner/sibling/child ... There is no point in somebody who doesn't know about living with disability deciding to habe a disabled main character.' and 'I doubt that it would be realistic for a main character. New authors are always being told, "Write what you know." So, while I would like characters to see and interact with more people using walkers in the city, I don'y really expect to see main characters using them.' (Emphasis mine)

I know there is bad disability representation, and I've seen it too. However, I don't think the solution to bad representation is that all abled writers should be banned or discouraged from making their main character disabled. I've seen plenty of male authors write terrible female characters, does that mean all male authors should only be allowed to write male main characters?

I don't want to be misunderstood; quantity is not the same as quality and I don't want more bad representation. However, I would rather have abled authors that are educated and have sensitivity readers write disabled characters, than for abled authors to be disallowed from ever writing disability. Simon Sort of Says features two disabled characters, and for that matter features characters from other ethnicities than the author, but Erin Bow used multiple sensitivity readers and wrote a fantastic and moving novel that won many awards, at least one specifically for its disability representation. I would rather live in a world where this book exists than in one where every abled author believes a disabled main character 'has no point'.

>20 GraceCollection: Ah, gotcha, thanks! I guess when I read those statements, I didn't think of it so much as "they shouldn't write at all" as "they should be very careful". But I was certainly bringing my assumptions to that reading. :)

>20 GraceCollection: That was well said. It raises a point on the issue and adds different perspectives on the situation!