Disability Memoir

The feature film directed by CODA’s Sian Heder streams on Apple starting November 13th "This important book will help ensure that every person gets a chance to live up to their full potential and will always have a place at the table.”—Hillary Clinton "Her life story as an activist will...

MEDICAL GASLIGHTING MEMOIR by author Anneke Vliegen, diagnosed with a combination of chronic, rare, barely visible and fluctuating diseases. Anneke describes her journey to happiness, after a misdiagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) brought her condescendence, humiliation and neglect. For twenty years, this medical gaslighting continued until she was close to death. The discovery of adrenal insufficiency, lupus and hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (hEDS) led to improved care and respect. The medical world had heard Anneke’s hooves, and assumed she needed to be treated like a ...

Born without Legs, She Inspires Others to Overcome Jen Bricker was born without legs. Shocked and uncertain they could care for her, her biological parents gave her up for adoption. In her loving adoptive home, there was just one simple rule: "Never say 'can't.'" And pretty soon, there was nothing this small but mighty powerhouse set her sights on that she couldn't conquer: roller-skating, volleyball, power tumbling, and spinning from silk ribbons thirty feet in the air.

He was a correctional officer who upheld the law. Then he became a homeless addict in America's largest open-air drug market. Budd's life was built on a foundation of order and discipline, following his father's footsteps into a career in corrections. But beneath the uniform, a relentless addiction was tearing his world apart, brick by agonizing brick. In a harrowing descent, he lost everything: his job, his family's trust, and finally, his home. He ended up on the streets of Kensington, Philadelphia—a neighborhood ravaged by a new, flesh-eating drug called "tranq." His slow suicide was ...

Ian Brown, award-winning author of The Boy in the Moon and the memoir Sixty, now recounts his daily reckoning with the milestone age of seventy. Fearlessly candid, often funny and relentlessly real, Brown asks the terrifying questions we all have about growing old, even when he doesn’t want to...

Folk musician, Broadway composer, and disability advocate Gaelynn Lea's warm, funny, poignant memoir is a love letter to every kind of body, to music, and to making it work––inviting us to embrace all of life's experiences with heart and determination. Read by the author and featuring...

A powerful memoir by one of America’s most accomplished public servants and legal thinkers—who spent years denying and working around his blindness, before finally embracing it as an essential part of his identity. "Moving, thoughtful, and inspiring." —Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy...

Diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) at 12, Kira believed she could never backpack away from everything that kept her stomach pain in check. But 13 years later, she hiked the entire 211-mile John Muir Trail — in the face of a debilitating flareup, a breakup, and a gut-wrenching parasite. Kira's (mis)adventures overcoming chronic pain among the breathtaking Sierra Nevada helped her rediscover everything her body was capable of. And in the highs and lows, the beauty and pain, the perseverance and regret, she came to understand true resilience. All to inspire you, the reader, to ...

When Roger Rasmussen was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2019, he did what most patients do: listened carefully, weighed his options, and tried to make peace with the life-altering decisions ahead. Then he heard about Joe Tippens' story, which led him down a rabbit hole of research into something unexpected—a compound called fenbendazole with curious case reports and a growing collection of personal accounts.

There on that helicopter, somewhere over Switzerland on a Sunday in June, came the first tiny whisper. A voice that would carry me for years to come. ‘I’m going to be okay. There’s still joy here.’ When Emma Carey was twenty, she fell from 14,000 feet and survived. In The Girl Who Fell...

Close your eyes and get ready to see the world in a new and more positive way. As a child in Toronto, Molly Burke was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa and became completely sightless as a teenager. Now an award-winning YouTube star and global influencer, Molly shares what it’s like to be a purple-haired, pink-obsessed fashion and makeup lover in a seeing world. She speaks with authenticity and candor about how she tackles the preconceived notions we have around blindness; Molly has made it her mission to make us see her - and ourselves- in a wholly empowering way.

A striking memoir in the vein of The Glass Castle and Half a Life, in which a young Alaskan woman must relearn how to live after accidentally killing a cyclist. When she was sixteen, Ella Jacobson drove through an intersection as a cyclist ran his red light. He died shortly after impact, while...

A former Social Security Administration (SSA) attorney goes behind the scenes to show you why it’s so difficult to win a Social Security Disability case. Working as an attorney advisor for over 10 years, the author drafted and reviewed thousands of disability decisions. During this time, he learned why the system is stacked against the claimant throughout the process. After he left SSA, he wanted to make this knowledge available to everyone.

Tess wasn’t searching for love—and she definitely wasn’t looking for a man with a power chair and a penchant for dad jokes. But when Corby’s clever and correctly punctuated dating profile caught her attention, one message turned into two, then twenty, and suddenly, her carefully predictable world was tilted on its axis. This story is more than a tale of love. It’s a wildly witty, refreshingly honest look at what happens when an intensely logical woman and a quadriplegic man collide online and discover something neither of them expected: a perfect match.

Brian Reese was good at masking his PTSD, bipolar disorder, depression, and anxiety. He even told himself he did not “deserve” benefits, which he later discovered was complete bullshit. As an air force officer deployed to Afghanistan, he embodied the motto of “service before self”. Unfortunately, like many veterans, his service came at his own expense, and abusing alcohol and drugs to cope with mental health issues nearly ended his life.

The story of the making of an autism self-advocate. A chronicle of Gyasi's journey from an early prognosis that he'd never make it beyond the 6th grade to graduating from college and eventually earning a master's degree. A recounting of Gyasi's struggles growing up without a definitive diagnosis and being black in predominately white schools. And a tribute to Gyasi's mother, Ruth, an academic who instilled in Gyasi a love of learning and always encouraged him to think and advocate for himself.

Over the last 18 years Tyler Hudson, father to a profoundly autistic boy named Lyric, has watched autism advocacy evolve from awareness, to acceptance, to what now borders on glorification—while the reality of children like his are rarely represented in society. Those on the deep end of the spectrum are easy to ignore because they often have no voice of their own. In The Missing Lyrics, Tyler shares his journey through grief to acceptance, offers cultural critique, and uncomfortable truths.

Prison abolition and decarceration are increasingly debated, but it is often without taking into account the largest exodus of people from carceral facilities in the 20th century: the closure of disability institutions and psychiatric hospitals. Decarcerating Disability provides a much-needed corrective, combining a genealogy of deinstitutionalization with critiques of the current prison system.

I spent my entire adult life hiding something that’s haunted me for as long as I can remember—dyslexia. OUTCAST, A Dyslexic in an Ivy League World, is the story of living with severe dyslexia and redefining the road to success, not through the privilege of education, but through triumph over extraordinary obstacles. Labeled a failure by the educational system, I finished last in my high school class. I never earned a college credit or read a book. Yet I carved an unlikely path into the heart of Wall Street, rising to become a senior executive at Merrill Lynch.

In Life Lessons, longtime journalist and best-selling author Bob Violino invites you on an enlightening journey through life's trials and triumphs. Drawing from his extraordinary experiences, he offers genuine insights and practical wisdom to help you overcome hardship and look for opportunities for growth. Bob's life has been a tapestry of remarkable events, from surviving a near-fatal cardiac arrest to navigating kidney disease.