Breaking the Cast

The autobiographies of people with disabilities fall into two camps.

One the one hand, those who acquire their disability in adolescence or later have been enculturated into the non-disabled society, to which they want nothing so much as a full return. They tend to present their disability as something like an ugly Christmas sweater, imposed upon them by external forces, a nuisance that must not be permitted to disguise their “real” (pre-disabled) self.

If you are born with your disability or acquire it early in life, on the other hand, it defines who you are: you cannot imagine what sort of “you” you would have been had the disability not cast your existence. Indeed, such speculation is existentially pointless.

Peter Kavanagh was only two months old in...