I have an anonymous request for a “Good Shit vs. Shit to Avoid” list:
Like many of us, I cope with things by reading about them, and I love finding a book about someone who has problems similar to mine and is able to thrive. I was recently diagnosed with a chronic condition that will almost certainly affect the rest of my life. It’s not fatal, and it’s not degenerative, but it is likely to lead to some level of physical disability in the future.
I am thus wondering about books with heroines who are physically disabled. I know there are books with deaf/Deaf heroines (I thoroughly enjoyed Tessa Dare’s Three Nights with a Scoundrel), but I’m primarily interested in reading about women with physical limitations—damaged legs, missing arms, confined to a wheelchair, suffering from multiple sclerosis, etc. One-eyed race car drivers need not apply.
There are heroes with war wounds, but I’ve encountered very few heroines with similar disabilities. My taste is kind of narrow—I love Julia Quinn, Tessa Dare, Loretta Chase, and most Lisa Kleypas for historicals (I have read Seduce Me at Sunrise, btw, and I’m just thinking I’ll go back and reread Win’s story…). I love Victoria Dahl (historicals and contemp), Jenny Crusie, and Nora Roberts. I much prefer fluff to angst, and I’m not really all that into paranormal romance, though I’m always willing to give things a shot.
I thought maybe the Bitchery could help me out here.
My first thought is Whisper Falls by Toni Blake, which features a heroine with Crohn’s Disease, among the Most Unsexy Chronic Ailments Ever, who doesn’t get better magically by the end of the book.
But I don’t recall any heroines with chronic, potentially debilitating problems like MS or fibromyalgia, for example. Do you know of any?
@MD
I have chronic illness and disability that mixes the invisible with the visible and I really agree with your words here.
@ Ridley
As usual 🙂 I also agree with pretty much with everthing you have said Ridley as well; particularly about the burden stuff and the dishonesty that goes with it as the heroine martyrs herself for the imaginary good of others. It always seems to me that authors who do this are re-writing ‘What Katy Did’ or WKD is the seminal text that informed their thinking about disability. The 19th century was a long time ago is the romance genre really so mired in the past?
@ Emily
Amy Lane has a son with ADHD. She is not arguing for special diets to fix things for her character. Amy has written lots of m/m stories where people deal with alcoholism, heart problems, HIV, PTSD, recovery from war-related injuries, etc. None of these stories present her characters as other than ordinary people dealing with what life has handed out. Her ADHD character is simply one of those.
@aphasia
I read to escape with the best of them. I think what people with disabilities like me are after, is a coherent and thoughtful representation of disability and chronic illness not a paint by numbers version. We want that representation to show us as ordinary people reaching for all the same things others are. If we don’t appear at all in the stories then it is like we are the Lady of Shallott looking at the world through a mirror and we all know the outcome of that – you die to the world around you.
For those who like heroes who struggle with real problems, Rose Lerner’s Regency, In for a Penny, has a nobleman hero who has a learning disability. The heroine is a very smart tradesman’s daughter. (Oh, I hope I’m not confusing this hero with another one where the heroine teaches the hero to read… I know that in In for a Penny the hero could read, but I think he had a really hard time with numbers.) The hero of her second book, A Lily Among Thorns, struggles with depression over the death of his identical twin and contemplates suicide. I love it that the people in her books have JOBS. Truly. They actually need money and figure out how to make it, just like REAL people.
I swear I turned off the bold and italics in that comment above. Argh!
I am amazed – AMAZED – that no one mentioned Miles Vorkosigan yet. Yes, he’s male, but severely disabled and only getting more so, and Lois McMaster Bujold writes him with such brilliance and sensitivity that most women I know who read her books fall in love with him anyway.
I will throw in a deaf heroine for you – Debra Webb’s Silent Reckoning and Silent Weapon feature a deaf heroine who went deaf as an adult and became a police detective. I liked them: I felt they were well done and the heroine was certainly not sitting around waiting for the hero to waltz in and rescue her.
Steph above mentioned Myrna Mackenzie. The book is Hired: Cinderella Chef. IIRC, the heroine was a police officer when she got shot and her legs are paralyzed.
As someone who has always loved reading, and perhaps even moreso since developing several chronic illnesses, let me say: Awesome topic!
My first thought is Whisper Falls by Toni Blake, which features a heroine with Crohn’s Disease […] But I don’t recall any heroines with chronic, potentially debilitating problems […]
Crohn’s Disease *is* a chronic, potentially debilitating problem.
For Ilona, she’s not the heroine, but there’s a major character in Meg Cabot’s Mediator series who has albinism. It’s been a while since I read the books; I remember it being dealt with very matter-of-factly (she covers up on the beach, for instance) and with a bit of an edge (she [rightfully] bitches out the narrator when the narrator acts weird about it), but I have no idea if it’s problematic or not.
Trying to kill the italics and bold.
This is such a fascinating discussion to read. I have ME and have also often wished that I could find more romances with heroines with incurable chronic conditions/disabilities.
I think we’ll all react differently to those portrayals, and there’s definitely no “right” or “wrong” way to react, but @Ridley , for myself, after my diagnosis, I struggled so much with the “burden” issue, despite all my husband’s reassurance – and I think that that struggle is SO ingrained in so many of us from the way society treats people with chronic conditions – that I would be genuinely startled by a disabled heroine who didn’t deal with that worry and let it affect her decision-making.
In real life, I know people who lost their partners after they were diagnosed, because their partners couldn’t deal with the major life shift involved; I know a lot of other women and men in happy marriages who still worry about the changes in their healthy partners’ lives due to their own disabilities. I also know for a fact, and from my own experience, that an HEA is possible anyway, and that when you really love someone, their chronic condition will in no way affect your love for them and your desire to be with them no matter what (and my own husband was justifiably OUTRAGED when I brought up the “burden” issue with him, because he couldn’t believe I would even think that)…
…but I couldn’t personally blame any heroine who simply assumed that her disability would be a real burden to the hero, because I think that’s the message that a LOT of us absorb from society’s attitudes to disability and disabled people. (I’ve even read people saying without any self-consciousness that people whose partners turn out to be chronically ill are “cursed” because of it.) So that concern just feels realistic to me. As long as the book doesn’t show that she’s *right* to think that – that in fact the hero’s life WOULD be made less by being with her – I wouldn’t be offended at all. I’d just be glad to see the heroine being reassured on it by the hero and the closing message of the book.
Oh, yes, I love Miles. I tell people that my favorite romantic scenes come from a non-romance: Miles and Ekaterin in “The Civil Campaign”, his letter of apology to her, and then saying “good bye” temporarily. I would highly recommend the whole series. But you have to read those series in order to really appreciate the emotions entirely.
On the other end of the scale: Mary Balogh “A Secret Affair” had a plot that hinged on a disabled character, which I totally hated. It just had the modern attitudes to disability transported, wholesale, into Regency era. I just could not stomach the heroine spouting all the politically correct language. Not that I think that the language is wrong today, we have come a lot way in our attitudes to disability, and this is good. But it was so completely out of place that I felt the book was preaching at me in the worst way, rather than telling a genuine story. Utterly ruined the whole thing for me.
…er. Actually, after writing my earlier comment, I just finally followed the link to OUT OF THE BLUE and realized I had actually read it, about 11 years ago (before getting M.E.) and my predominant memory was how I annoyed I had gotten with the heroine in the second half of the book, and thus how I’d lost interest in it…
…so as much as I support, in principle, authors who show heroines dealing with this common and painful issue, I have to say I did join @Ridley in annoyance at this particular example!
closing the bold tag
@MD: I don’t know how you can refer to A Civil Campaign as a non-romance, since it’s explicitly referenced as one in the dedication to Jane, Charlotte, Georgette, and Dorothy, and largely modelled after Peter Wimsey’s relationship with Harriet Vane. But yes, Miles is a favourite of mine. I was going to argue that Miles loses a lot of the chornically ill factors once he gets his bones replaced with plastics (space age surgery for the win) BUT then I realised his issues only get worse post Mirror Dance when he’s dealing with the fallout from a major major injury (can’t discuss details of it here, but the whole series sort of tilts after this injury) including blackouts, seizures, having to have somebody monitor him, not being able to fly his lightflyer. The bit where he wonders how he can convince somebody to marry him when she’d have the “fun” of being his spotter during seizures….it gets a leetle angsty but Bujold balances this pretty well against the humor of the rest of the series.
I actually thought of another Bujold hero: Dag, from the Sharing Knife books, who is missing a hand. Like Miles, he’s adapted pretty well, in that most of the time, you don’t notice it, but it does impact the plot in a few spots.
@ Cleo – I’ve read Sealed with a Kiss – liked it, and also one of the followup books where the heroine does something positively lovely for the coeliac heroine. I think I gave the third/fourth ones a bit of a side eye though, probably shouldn’t have read them so close together.
Full disclosure : I have coeliac myself and it’s so hard not to apologise for what a nuisance it can be when eating out – I was nice to see that played out in fiction.
@ /b/i FD – this is a noisy question, but are you European? I ask because of the different spelling, and because I’ve heard that it’s easier to be gluten-free in some European countries than in the US (because of a higher level of public awareness about the condition and more straight forward labeling). And I’ve always wondered if that’s really the case. And if easier is the same as easy.
I’m about a third of the way through the book and haven’t gotten to the apologizing for being high maintenance when eating out scene (but I have lived it).
Like I said, there’s perfectly normal insecurity, and then there’s lying to everyone who shows an interest in you to keep them from sticking around and shouldering the back-breaking burden you imagine yourself to be.
I mean, in The Marriage Miracle, a book by Liz Fielding I linked above, the heroine lied to her fiance after her accident about cheating on him with a PT in the rehab, so he could be free of her. The book takes place 3-4 years after her accident and she can’t look at her godson without inwardly wincing in pain at what she’s lost and she hacks at her hair with scissors when the hero pursues her, hoping to make herself too ugly for him to want.
Normal insecurity would be wonderful. I’d love that in a book. What I’ve seen, though, isn’t normal. It hasn’t been insecurity or frustration or mourning, it’s been self-loathing and martyrdom.
Even this would be perfectly valid, if the narrative acknowledged that it wasn’t healthy. Instead of showing it as unhealthy behavior, it’s played as the pinnacle of selflessness. In real life, when we worry about being a pain, that worry comes at least in part from a place of selfishness. We don’t want our friends and family to be annoyed with or resent us; we want them to like us and want to spend time with us. In the books I’ve read, the “burden” cliche hinges entirely on the able bodied person’s feelings. The disabled character pushes the love interest away because they’ll be better off that way. That’s not wrestling with insecurity, that’s depression, and it’s a fallacy to link depression with disability.
Lucy Gordon had a heroine who was blind. Not being blind myself, I can’t say for sure if it was accurate, but I remember not hating the way the character was portrayed.
After reading the comments, I wonder if anyone has ever come across a book where one of the characters (hero or heroine, or bff – doesn’t matter to me) has type 1 diabetes. I’ve only read one YA novel with a diabetic heroine, and it was so poorly researched that it made me want to cry. As a diabetic myself, I’d love to erase that memory and read one that’s well written. Any suggestions?
@pixelfish – I think of “The Civil Campaign” as non-romance because even though it clearly references romance, I don’t think it can/should be read as a stand-alone book. You really need the whole series to understand where Miles is coming from. I read a couple of reviews who tried various books in the middle of the series, and made various comments about not understanding the character motivations, but where the reviewer clearly does not see the whole background Bujold builds. And the series as a whole is sci-fi.
“The Sharing Knife” feels a lot more like a romance to me, and you can tell – so many guys I know could not cope with the idea and run away screaming.
Speaking of disabled people, Bujold in general is really great doing various kinds of broken/disabled characters. I also really liked what she did with Simon Illyan in the Vorkosigan series, how his adjustment to memory changes was handled. Another example of a real person dealing with a change in his situation, and coping in a realistic fashion. Plus, I totally love Caz in “The Curse of Chalion” who is not disabled per se, but who feels broken by his experience of war, and then has to deal with a demon trapped in his body, which is analogous to an illness and involves pain etc.
@Ridley – ack. Yes, that goes way beyond normal insecurity into really bad territory…and if the book treats it like a good thing, the healthy/noble way to behave, then that is a MASSIVE problem.
I have a special place in my heart for Miles Vorkosigan, who may be the ONLY character with epilepsy I have ever encountered who doesn’t either grow out of it or let it overwhelm his life. Lois McMaster Bujold has my undying gratitude for creating a character with epilepsy who isn’t the star of a problem novel or a plot device. The only other one I can think of (and she’s not in a book) is Max, Jessica Alba’s character from the television series Dark Angel.
It’s difficult for me to come up with too many heroines with disabilities- but I can think of many “heroes” who do. Mike, from the third of Robyn Carr’s Virgin River novels, has a brain injury, and Michael Kenyon in Mary Jo Putney’s Shattered Rainbows has asthma. Also, Rachel Gibson’s Nothing but Trouble has a hockey player who’s been seriously disabled by a car accident.
@jivediva I’ve been reading this discussion with interest but haven’t commented until now. I have a book coming out in about 10 days with a diabetic heroine. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, researching that book and writing that heroine. In the past I’ve had secondary characters with MS but I could use personal family experience for that. This I had to research from the bottom up and it’s a heartbreaking condition that is becoming increasingly prevalent in today’s society (as you obviously know). I have an interview with a researcher, and another with a mom with a diabetic daughter who has an alert dog, coming up on my blog, and I definitely did tonnes of research. I don’t know how authentic my heroine is though, I only know I worked really really hard trying to make her credible. I can’t tell you which category it fits into ‘Good shit vs Shit to avoid’ 🙂 I’m the author. You’d have to decide.
As a quadriplegic for 36 of my 40 years I too am constantly on the lookout for books featuring disabled characters. I’ve read many of the suggestions made and discovered a few new ones thanks to all of you. My biggest issue with these kinds of stories is when the character is cured therefore finally achieving their HEA. It’s insulting to me to put a bow on it so easily. Moping too is not allowed. Having a disability is not how I envisioned things, but I’m happy for every day I have with friends and family. So when a character is constantly moping I get irritated. I have yet to find a totally perfect representation of my life, but there are some that have come close. Dancing In Moonlight being one that I enjoyed.
Nicola Griffith’s “Always” is a mystery/thriller with a romantic subplot, and the love interest (as well as the author herself) has MS. It’s the last book of a trilogy (“The Blue Place”, “Stay”, and “Always”), all of which are phenomenally spectacularly unbelievably good.
@Toni Anderson – Thank you for putting in the time and effort to be accurate. I will definitely give your book a read! I checked out the excerpt on the B&N website, and it sure sounds promising 🙂
Why are there so many more disabled heroes than heroines? Is it just the “caretaker” thing that women are supposed to be so conditioned to be good at, or is it something else?
I feel like injury and certain kinds of disability in men is considered “sexy”—see facial scarring, pseudo-PTSD of the “no, I just brood and snarl and that makes me attractive” variety, etc.—but in women? It’s off-putting and utterly unsexy. Ugh. (Not that I share this belief. Just saying that’s what I think the cultural construct is.)
As someone with Crohn’s disease, I was really disappointed in Whisper Falls. I’d put it in the STA category, honestly. However, I will acknowledge that the day-to-day living with Crohn’s can vary widely person to person (I have four friends who also have Crohn’s—and it manifests itself differently for all of us)—and so despite my “yeah RIGHT” reaction to Toni Blake’s heroine, the book could be meaningful to someone else.
@ Cleo Well guessed – I’m in the UK. I’ve been coeliac in the US and the UK and various parts of Europe and I’d say overall it is easier here. Labelling is definitely stricter due to EU rules (much to the manufacturer’s displeasure) and I have fewer issues with foods where I’ve read the label and theoretically the item ought to be ok, but clearly is not after eating. That said, it has really only gotten much easier in the last ten years. Slowly, but surely, awareness has been spreading and now most supermarkets will have a g-f section and many products will be labelled g-f or not which speeds shopping up considerably. I can even go out and quite often ask about gluten and have waitstaff know what I’m talking about. That said, I still play it on the safe side, especially if they seem unsure/confident! What is also helpful, although I’m no longer in the bracket to benefit, is that coeliac as a lifelong disease falls into the bracket where you can get prescriptions for gluten free products – makes life easier, because here as pretty much everywhere, gluten free foods are generally more expensive!
I’m not sure you’d classify it as a romance novel but there is romance in Ben Elton’s Gridlock.
I recently read a Harlequin Romance by Fiona Harper, Housekeeper’s Happy Ever After. The heroine has had a traumatic brain injury due to a car crush. The book obviously has a HEA, but the character is not “cured” by the power of love.
Another book that I found interesting by in a new line called “Reality Based Romance” The publisher is TCI. The first book I picked up in this series was by Julie Leto who I was familaiar with because of all her Harlequine Blazes etc.
The name was “Hard to Hold” and the hero has Tourette’s.
Also not cured by the power of love. His tics are usally controlled by meds, but the symptons are not totally suppressed, because when he is tired or sick he started to
have involuntary vocalizations.
Someone mentioned earlier that mostly we see the heroes with the disabilities. But don’t you think that is because so many of them have been to war? Heroics warriors are a standard of romance, which lends itself to disabling injuries. My favorite historical romance are regencies, and many of those dashing aides to Wellington come home and have an attack of PTSD while watching post Waterloo celebrations. Dorothy Sayers was writing about shell shock post WWI, Lord Peter Whimsey had it, and it is very prominent in the Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club published in 1928 which takes place on Armistice Day.
@ vee
You have reminded me of Jacqueline Winspear’s fantastic books which are about a female psychologist and private investigator, Maisie Dobbs. The first book is set in 1929 and the stories are very much about the aftermath of WW1 and the suffering that affects the survivors. I remember her offsider Billy as having PTSD/shell shock and drug problems.
The Ride of Her Life Natasha Moore Samhain Publishing Heroine gets diagnosed with MS and decides to take a trip with her high school crush. I’ll admit it has been a while seen I’ve read this book it does have the heroine feel like a burden but i forgive her because literally just got the diagnosis. there are also explicit sex scenes
Till Dawn with the Devil: Lords of Vice Alexandra Hawkins Heroine is blind since childhood she doesn’t really deal with self- pity much.
Love Is Blind Lynsay Sands heroine is not quite blind but has such bad eyesight that she can’t see with out her glass which her stepmother forbids her to wearing Hero is scared from war and self conscience about scar. usually folly’s happen it is more romcom than brooding.
THE MAKING OF A GENTLEMAN by Shana Galen
hero has spent his childhood in prison the heroine is hired by his family to teach him to speak and became a gentle man. it is part of a series
those are the ones I can think of right now that haven’t been mention plus I’m avoiding my thesis right now so I should probably stop that
I second the Rose Lerner rec for In for a Penny. The hero is so bad with numbers that he’s ignored his own estate’s books. It’s a marriage of convenience book, for those who like that kind of thing (which I do).
The only regency novel Juliet Blyth appears to have written was The Parfit Knight,now out of print but available used, in which the heroine has been blinded by being run down by a coach. After that everyone she knows appears to have decided that she is now a porcelain ornament too fragile to ever leave the house again. The hero is a bit implausibly inventive and, well, perfect in encouraging her to do new things, but I like her growth throughout the novel and the way her well-meaning relatives are shown to have had their expectations entirely wrong.
Ridley,
I must disagree with you that there’s no relationship between disability and depression. I can’t speak for every disability, but research shows that people with epilepsy have a much higher incidence of depression than the general population.
I don’t think depression should be represented as a healthy behavior, but it can certainly accompany disability. I speak from experience when I say that there can be a lot of guilt, anger, and depression involved when a disability forces you to impose on others at their inconvenience, even if they’re wonderful human beings. Something I hardly ever see either is the impact medications you have to take to manage your disability have on your functionality and personality. Nothing But Trouble dealt with this pretty well, but it’s not common.
True love with someone who is disabled is so hard to believe in. So many people just walk away when it’s more than they can deal with. I had a doctor who viewed my husband with mistrust for five years- it’s that common for a husband or wife to walk away. There should be more of these books just because there are so many disabled women who truly believe they never will be able to find someone who will love them and stay with them, no matter what.
As a reader with a disability myself, I am so interested in this subject that I did my thesis on it. Unfortunately, since it was a thesis in teaching reading & early childhood education, I’m more likely to be able to provide a list of picture books/YA books that have characters with disabilities, but I have a couple of books for grown-ups that I can recommend. (And trust me, when it comes to literature for kids/YA lit, even though I think there are a lot more options for accurate portrayals of characters with disabilities, there is definitely some still entirely too much Shit To Avoid.)
First off, I echo so much of what Ridley says, especially regarding Catherine Anderson – Definitely STA.
As far as romance goes, I just recently finished another Kleypas, Love in the Afternoon, and the hero had (what I perceived to be) very realistically portrayed PTSD. (A tiny bit reservedly recommended, though, because I felt the ending was a little too Happily Ever After, but YMMV.) I know I’ve picked a ton of books to Mooch from AAR’s Less Than Perfect list, although it’s quite out of date & the books aren’t rated: http://www.likesbooks.com/disabled.html (I was going to put it as a link, but with the code being screwy, I’m just going to leave it readable)
As far as non-romance, I can offer a couple more –
The first book of Carolyn Crane’s Disillusionist Series, Mind Games, has a heroine who has hypochondria, but there are also a lot of fantasy/sci-fi elements to that story, so I can’t say it’s a romance. Good, intriguing, different, but not exactly a romance. (I haven’t made it any further in the series yet, but the character is in those books as well, so it’ll be interesting to see how her character evolves.)
Another non-romance but a wonderfully lovely book with a main character with a disability is Elizabeth Berg’s We Are All Welcome Here; the woman in the story has polio and requires an iron lung. What I liked best about this book was that she was just living her life in the lung… make adaptations, sure, and there were issues and consequences that popped up along the way, but she was just doing her thing. I thought it was great.
If you’re at all interested in YA, Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls, by Jane Lindskold is interesting – the heroine has a rare form of mutism, and has lived in an asylum for most of her life. Definitely fantasy, though, as opposed to romance.
@Kirsten
Let me put a finer point on it, then. Disability isn’t inextricably tied to depression. The LGBT community also has higher than average depression rates, yet that romance narrative isn’t limited to depression story lines.
I want more variety, I guess. Your average disabled person isn’t consumed with self-loathing.
closing bold tags?
Hmm. Second try?
Could it be The Gambler, Lavyrle Spencer?
I read Izzy Willy Nilly by Cynthia Voight when I was in year nine (so 1989 or thereabouts). The centre of the story was involved in a car accident and has had part of her leg amputated. The Amazon site (link below) gives a good review. Excellent book, and probably the first book I read of someone my age that I could relate to who has a disability.
http://www.amazon.com/Izzy-Willy-Nilly-Cynthia-Voigt/dp/0689804466
Into the Fire by Suzanne Brockmann has a deaf heroine, Hannah. It’s not my favourite book of the series but I seem to remember it was handled pretty well (although admittedly I have no experience of deafness so others may disagree).
I know you wanted heroines but Frisco’s Kid has a hero dealing with a career-ending leg injury and I absolutely adore that book.
Oh also, Dance With Me by Heidi Cullinan is very good in terms of a main character who deals with chronic pain. The author has a chronic pain condition herself so I assume it’s very realistically done. It’s M/M though which I know isn’t to everyone’s taste.