Not Oprah’s Book Club: MEAN Little deaf Queer

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In Terry Galloway’s funny, fast-moving, family-oriented memoir, MEAN Little deaf Queer, the reader gets the sense that there couldn’t possibly be anyone more entertaining to have a beer with than Galloway. She’s a storyteller of the most exquisite variety–focusing on all the right, telling details, taking you into literal and emotional worlds that feel both familiar and fascinating at the same time, and proving inexhaustible in the creative opportunities she sees in her own trials and tribulations.

Essentially, this memoir (rumor has it she’s working on a sequel) takes you through her early life growing up deaf and randy and rebellious, becoming a guerilla theater star in Austin, and on through to that land called Adulthood. Galloway writes so beautifully about her conflicted and ever-performative relationship with her own body, her own gender, her own identity. An excerpt:

After I was given my new identity as a deaf child, all that ardent fancy changed. I fell out of love with my own being, my own body, and lost the sense of myself as the center of my own story. I thought, then, that a hero ought to look like all those beautiful boys whose lives and gender I envied.

MEAN Little deaf Queer is one of those books that doesn’t preach about intersectionality, but is it, in a really compelling, artful, honest way. I can’t recommend this awesome memoir more. It’s out in paperback now and there are some powerful videos that you can watch of Galloway’s journey after authoring the book here.

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