All the Difference

by Patricia Horvath

Patricia Horvath's transformation from a visibly disabled young woman to someone who, abruptly, "passes" for able-bodied, reveals cultural and personal tensions surrounding disability and creates an arc that connects imprisonment to freedom. What transpires is both suffocating and liberating. Horvath's confinement keeps her from being seen, but also cocoons a deeply personal sense of selfhood and relationship.

Horvath's lyric account of her experiences with severe scoliosis sings the connective tissue between her physical disability and her powerful interior. She is "poorly put together," her "body leans sharply to the left," she is "brittle-boned, stoop-shouldered, with an "S" shaped spine," her words flame up spirited and true. Wry and breathtakingly poignant, this meditative, inspirational memoir delves into that most invisible, vital structure: identity, whose shaping and disfigurement makes all the difference in our lives.

This book will particularly appeal to people interested in disability studies, feminist issues, 1970s popular culture, fairy tales, and survival.

Patricia Horvath's stories and essays have been published widely in literary journals including Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, New Ohio Review, The Los Angeles Review, and Confrontation. She is the recipient of New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in both fiction and literary nonfiction and of Bellevue Literary Review's Goldenberg Prize in Fiction for a story that was accorded a Pushcart Prize Special Mention. She teaches at Framingham State University in Massachusetts.

188 pages, Paperback

Published August 8, 2017

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Patricia Horvath is a bookish college professor much more at home in sedentary pursuits — sitting in her writing chair, tucking away in the library — than in active ones. She never learned to ride a bike, always struck out at bat, and failed her school fitness tests.

As she describes in her memoir, All the Difference, her rejection of physical activities is mainly due to her bones, her body inhibited early on by severe scoliosis. Horvath’s book is a beautiful chronicling of her adolescent struggles through disability and debilitating treatment that included spinal surgery, body casts, and braces limiting her mobility.

Read the rest of my review in Hippocampus Magazine: http://www.hippocampusmagazine.com/20...

[Carole Duff · Rating 5 out of 5]

“You have the bones of a 70-year-old,” a doctor tells the author, even though she’s thirty years younger. Her way-ward walk and diagnosis of osteoporosis frames the harrowing story of surgical treatment for scoliosis as a teenager. An honest, beautifully crafted memoir about how a girl, her family, friends, caretakers, and strangers handle physical difference.

[Rolf Semprebon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This memoir is excellent, written with humor and insight to overcome the sadness of many of the events.