Disability Autobiography and Memoir Bibliography
Compiled by Stephanie L. Kerschbaum, April 2012
Bauby, Jean-Dominique. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. New York: Vintage, 1998. Print.
Bérubé, Michael. Life As We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1996. Print.
Callahan, John. Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Print.
Cheney, Terri. Manic: A Memoir. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. Print.
Cohen, Richard. Blindsided: Lifting a Life Above Illness: A Reluctant Memoir. New York:
HarperCollins, 2004. Print.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Underming America. New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2010. Print.
Finger, Anne. Elegy for a Disease: A Personal and Cultural History of Polio. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 2006. Print.
Grandin, Temple. Thinking in Pictures and Other Reports from My Life with Autism. New York:
Vintage Books, 1995. Print.
Grealy, Lucy. Autobiography of a Face. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994. Print.
Hall, Meredith. Without a Map: A Memoir. Boston: Beacon, 2007. Print.
Hockenberry, John. Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of
Independence. New York: Hyperion, 1995. Print.
Jamison, Kay Redfield. An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness. New York: Vintage,
1996. Print.
Jamison, Kay Redfield. Nothing Was the Same: A Memoir. New York: Knopf, 2009. Print.
Johnson, Harriet McBryde. Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life. New York:
Picador, 2005. Print.
Johnson, Merri Lisa. Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality. Berkeley,
CA: Seal Press, 2010. Print.
Keller, Helen. The Restored Classic: The Story of My Life. Ed. Roger Shattuck with Dorothy
Herrmann. New York: Norton, 2003. Print.
Kleege, Georgina. Sight Unseen. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999. Print.
Kuusisto, Stephen. Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening. New York: W.W.
Norton, 2006. Print.
Kuusisto, Stephen. Planet of the Blind. New York: Delta Publishing Group Inc., 1998. Print.
Laborit, Emmanuelle. Le Cri de la Mouette. Paris: R. Laffont, 1994. Print. (English version: The
Cry of the Gull. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet UP, 1999. Print.)
Linton, Simi. My Body Politic. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2005. Print.
Mairs, Nancy. Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman’s Life. New York: Harper, 1986. Print.
Mairs, Nancy. Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled. Boston: Beacon, 1996.
Print.
Manguso, Sarah. The Two Kinds of Decay. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Print.
Marchetto, Marisa Acocella. Cancer Vixen: A True Story. New York: Knopf, 2006. Print.
Metzl, Jonathan. Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
Middlebrook, Christina. Seeing the Crab: A Memoir of Dying Before I Do. New York: Basic Books,
1996. Print.
Millet, Kate. The Loony Bin Trip. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990. Print.
Murphy, Robert. The Body Silent: The Different World of the Disabled. New York: Henry Holt,
1987. Print.
O’Brien, Ruth, ed. Voices from the Edge: Narratives about the Americans with Disabilities Act.
New York: Oxford UP, 2004. Print.
Patchett, Ann. Truth and Beauty: A Friendship. New York: Harper Perennial, 2004. Print.
Jon Pineda's Sleep in Me. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2010. Print.
Prince-Hughes, Dawn. Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey Through Autism. New York:
Three Rivers Press, 2004. Print.
Roth, William. Movement: A Memoir of Disability, Cancer, and the Holocaust. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2008. Print.
Savarese, Ralph James. Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption. New York:
Other, 2007. Print.
Tammet, Daniel. Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant. New
York: Free Press, 2006. Print.
Wagner, Pamela Spiro and Carolyn S. Spiro. Divided Minds: Twin Sisters and their Journey
Through Schizophrenia. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005. Print.
Williams, Donna. Nobody Nowhere: The Remarkable Autobiography of an Autistic Girl. London:
Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1992. Print.
Williams, Donna. Somebody Somewhere: Breaking Free from the World of Autism. New York:
Three Rivers Press, 1994. Print.
Geller, Jeffrey and Maxine Harris. Women of the Asylum: Voices From Behind the Walls, 1840–
1945. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. Print.
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Thanks to the following individuals for their help in compiling this list: Brenda Brueggemann,
John Duffy, Kristin Lindgren, Margaret Price, Hilary Selznick, Amy Vidali, Muffy Walter.