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Whose Line Is It, Anyway?: Doing Harm In Disability Memoir, Teresa Milbrodt

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This paper examines disability memoirs, and the author's responsibility to their community versus their personal story. While telling stories of disability can be a means of sharing one's truth, authors may be wrongly interpreted as speaking for a diverse community of individuals, or they may do harm to other disabled people by devaluing an entire group. Some memoirsts have avoided this potential for harm by expanding their notions of disability and community to embrace intersectionality, but it is vital to read a wide variety of disability memoirs to gain this complex picture.