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lightreads) wrote2023-07-20 10:25 am
lightreads) wrote2023-07-20 10:25 am
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Carnal Acts: Essays by Nancy Mairs
Carnal Acts: Essays
4/5. Collection of her work spanning many years. Demonstrating (1) that she gets better with age (who doesn’t?); (2) she knows it and feels a bit squirmy about early work (fair enough); and (3) that I read her differently now. I’ve always appreciated her, but she was on a different track, disability-wise, than I was. Her disease was progressive and mine wasn’t. That changes things.
Now my disease is progressive – was always progressive but has now progressed – whatever. And, suddenly in the past few weeks, an old friend is finding herself somewhere near the end of that long, slow slide down. That changes things. She knocked the breath out of me at least twice.
4/5. Collection of her work spanning many years. Demonstrating (1) that she gets better with age (who doesn’t?); (2) she knows it and feels a bit squirmy about early work (fair enough); and (3) that I read her differently now. I’ve always appreciated her, but she was on a different track, disability-wise, than I was. Her disease was progressive and mine wasn’t. That changes things.
Now my disease is progressive – was always progressive but has now progressed – whatever. And, suddenly in the past few weeks, an old friend is finding herself somewhere near the end of that long, slow slide down. That changes things. She knocked the breath out of me at least twice.
She was brilliant!
Her books was crucial for me when I had to retire from paid work. I learned that the relentless attention paid me by non-disabled people was systemic not personal. Given how many people in my family have died in the past decade, I should reread A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories
I gave away my copy and now it seems to be out of print. Happily a scanned print/text-to-speech version of A Troubled Guest is available for hourly checkout from the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/troubledguestlif00mair
Carnal Acts is also there: https://archive.org/details/carnalactsessays00mair
I did find a one-hour (uncaptioned) documentary streaming free on YouTube. Titled "Waist-high in the world," it includes biographical details and photos as well as her reading several essays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XggyWE7sVlI
An interview between the doc maker, poet Janice L Dewey, and Mairs in the Review of Disability Studies https://www.rdsjournal.org/index.php/journal/article/view/15/
Re: She was brilliant!
Wow, thanks. Yeah, she is hard to find. The National Library Service has several of her titles in audio, as well they should -- otherwise I don't know where I'd get them.