A Nearly Normal Life

by Charles L. Mee Jr.

As a fourteen-year-old boy from a small Midwestern town, Charles Mee believed in God, family, and his future, which, at the very least, included girls and a long spell as a hometown football hero. But when he collapsed one night at a school dance, his dreams began to vanish. In a narrative at once funny and profound, Mee brilliantly captures the era in which polio, not communism, was every American parent's nightmare. Unraveling the mysteries of his own Cold War youth, Mee gives voice both to the child with a potentially fatal disease and to the man whose recognition of himself as a disabled outsider has served to heighten his gifts as a storyteller.

Genres: Nonfiction, Collections, Memoir

240 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1999

About the author

Charles L. Mee is an American playwright, historian and author known for his collage-like style of playwriting, which makes use of radical reconstructions of found texts. He is also a professor of theater at Columbia University. (Source: Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Mars Prokop · Rating 5 out of 5]

Charles Mee offers a compelling look at the plague of the 1950s- polio- while discussing Americana, communism, popularity and other social graces and foibles.

Although today's literary market is glutted with memoir, Mee's book stands out because his hopefulness is laced with cynism, and the life and recovery he depicts don't beg pity. He wrote, he said, simply to seek understanding and discovery. The memoirs I like to read these days offer a similar juxtaposition of horror and relief, comedy and tragedy. This book has it all.

[Diana · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a book about the author's life after being struck by a debilitating case of polio at the age of 14. Some passages are moving, but it is not consistently engaging. I did learn a good deal about polio from reading the book.

[Samantha Parkes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just finished _A Nearly Normal Life_ by Charles L. Mee, a memoir of the author’s experience becoming ill with polio at the age of 14 and his journey through the happy-go-lucky 1950s as he explored the life of the mind, lost his religion, and experimented with deviancy. This is more than a coming-of-age story; it’s an examination of pandemic response and the contentious journey toward a vaccine in addition sharing the experiences of various other polio patients who were affected in a myriad of ways by the virus and treated with varying degrees of compassion by the medical establishment. There are a lot of gems of wisdom strewn throughout the book and it’s a very accessible, quick, and satisfying read with lots of redemption. I’ve taught this book two times before, so this my third time reading it and I really enjoyed it.

[Karen Ferguson · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is normal, denial as a coping strategy. Fighting was expected. Forced to be a good handicapped person, bitterness and anguish not allowed. Acceptance, denial and passing it off as broken leg, or normalization by fiction that it was no big deal. A fascinating account of how a 14 year old athletic boy copes with polio, how he lives his life and becomes an adult he never expected or imagined .

[Sandy Mason · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very high standard for normal

Charles Lee was smarter than average,had loving and understanding parents,?
good friends and teachers, and the best medical care at the time. Still polio robbed him of what he wanted most-his life to continue as promised. It would change and this is a story of strength.

[Karen Jean Martinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Chuck Mee! I love Chuck Mee!

I'm working on a production of BIG LOVE right now, so I figured that reading about his life sort of counted as research, although really I just wanted to read about his life (because I don't think that knowing everything about a playwright is necessary when staging the play, even if understanding Mee's sensibility is very helpful).

I just love the way he writes - plays and memoirs both. His descriptions of polio are so descriptive, I felt like I got a true sense of how the virus affected the body. Even more interesting to me was how he interwove this experience with thoughts on American culture of the fifties, and how hard everyone around him (including himself at times) worked to try make his difference invisible to their normality - and the pathology of such a move.

This got me thinking about the Juan Williams thing today (which I will refrain from commenting on directly because I think that we all make knee-jerk judgements of people based on how they look, and it's what we do with that first reaction that matters). The idea - rational or irrational - that someone marked by difference (Muslims dressed in accordance to Islamic dress code in the Williams instance, Mee with his fire engine red crutch in the former instance) somehow chooses their difference OVER their Americanism is absurd. Absurd that there is some "normal" daily American attire - which, by the way, would seem to be pajama pants and slippers according the flights I've taken recently (and why would we EVER want to uphold this as proper public attire) - and everything else is an affront to Americanism is completely at odds with what I think of as American. Couldn't we instead view the wearing of religious attire as a celebration of Americanism, where the first amendment guarantees free establishment? I know, I know, what a naive dreamer I am, but having just read in the Mee about how the imposition of "normal" negatively weighs on everyone (even the normals, especially the different), I don't want to return to that narrative.

Okay, soapbox rant ended.

[Anne Samachson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Until his 14th summer, Charles Mee's world seemed safe and unshakable --- secure in a small Midwestern town, surrounded by a loving family, winning praise for his athletic prowess and on the verge of getting his first kiss. And then, suddenly, everything changed. Mee's exposure to the polio virus didn't just infect him --- it profoundly altered his reality, forever changing his perceptions of himself, his family and the way the world works. In this beautiful, heartbreaking tale, Mee poignantly recounts the story of the sick, lonely, frightened child he was and his transformation to the man he is today --- brilliant, creative, funny and "nearly normal."
Comment

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted more from this. The parts that were good were very good--the events in the hospital shortly after his polio diagnosis were very vivid and well-told, and I liked the context provided. I think the problem was, he doesn't remember enough details from the rest of his teenage experience, and he didn't want to pull a James Frey and fictionalize it. I felt I was left with an incomplete picture as a result. Strange to say, fictionalizing the story may have made it more real.

[cassie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think this book has good intentions, but it would rather bore you with its incessant rattling of Polio trivia and 1950s nostalgia. If Mee had stuck with a singular focus of his book, it would have been more engaging. Instead, it is schizophrenic and surprisingly surface-level. Advice: skip it and Google polio.

[Allegra · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is worth reading if you are familiar with Chuck Mee and his work. I could not imagine it would be an entertaining read for someone who is not a Chuck Mee fan.

However, it also contains a lot of interesting information about polio and valuable highlights from the work of other researchers, philosophers, and writers.

[Dennis Gillingham · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was an emotional read for me and brought back many painful memories that I had no idea existed. It also reminded me of the efforts by my parents to make my world as normal as possible, I am so happy I read this book as a survivor of polio, but do not know how the general public will like or not like the effort.

[Marti]

Passed on to me by Mom.

[Annabelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

An unexpected gem. I couldn't put it down!