Disabled Storytellers considers how medieval forms of life writing speak to Critical Disability Studies and disability-oriented communities today. The introduction opens with the author’s reflections on teaching the Middle English Revelations of Divine Love (or Showings) of Julian of Norwich during the early COVID-19 lockdowns. Julian’s account of her spiritual reflections on illness and isolation in the wake of the bubonic plague deeply resonated with students, fostering unexpected connections across time and circumstances. The author then offers a comparative reading of Julian and Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, highlighting Wang’s modern pilgrimage for healing and her creation of community among disabled peers. The introduction considers two of this book’s key terms: crip time, the non-normative ways disabled and ill people experience time and space; and crip intimacy, a disability-centered closeness that can connect people – including authors and readers – across time, space, and identity. Summaries of the book’s chapters are included.

This chapter surveys travel writing across medieval Afro-Eurasia, revealing how disabled and chronically ill authors adapt to ever-shifting circumstances of travel. This discussion traces how first-person reflections on mobility are shaped by divergent religiomedical frameworks (approaches to disability attending to historical religious and medical understandings of the body in any given cultural environment). From firsthand accounts to imagined journeys, travel enables writers to question social norms and envision alternate ways of living. Disability in motion not only disrupts daily routines and expectations but it also reshapes literary traditions, creating new forms of storytelling and new ways of thinking about illness, aging, and interdependence. Operating in a comparative and not a strictly chronological mode, this chapter discusses works by Muslim pilgrim-explorer Ibn Battuta and Chinese literati poets such as Bai Juyi and Shangguan Wan’er. It reintegrates European writers Margery Kempe and Teresa de Cartagena into this broader social context of transcontinental mobility.

Chapter 4 treats Norman Mailer’s sui generis Advertisements for Myself as a critical moment in the psychopath’s genealogy. Critics have long debated the text’s generic classification, treating it, on the one hand, as an anthology (an attempt to capitalize on the antecedent self of its author in order to resell his previous work) and, on the other, an autobiography (an attempt to capitalize on the fame of previous work to sell the self that produced it). Both classifications presuppose an antecedent, fixed subject, traditionally held to be the source of the literary text (a vexed issue for theorists of literary interpretation during the period). Reading beyond the problematic racial politics of “The White Negro,” the essay that Mailer placed at the center of the book and whose eponymous hipster hero he dubbed a “philosophical psychopath,” the chapter concentrates on Mailer’s attempt to cast the psychopath as an alternative to the fixed self – an icon of resistance to the massifying and conformist pressures in the domain of domestic labor during the Cold War. The form that resistance takes is the appropriation of the genre of the novel to fashion a protagonist whose biography is his creator’s previous work.

This chapter considers the Latin poetry of medieval English poet John Gower, who became blind in later life. Gower recursively revises own poetry as his blindness increases, and he establishes a potent discourse of blind life writing that self-identified Blind advocates would later adopt in their international mission to advocate for disabled people. In addressing Gower’s life as portrayed in modern-day media (i.e., mystery novels and audiobooks, including medievalist Bruce Holsinger’s historical fiction series A Burnable Book), this chapter considers modern paradigms of “close listening” alongside works by blind theorist and memoirist Georgina Kleege. Nineteenth-century compilations of Blind authors discussed in this chapter include James Wilson’s Biography of the Blind (1838) and William Hanks Levy’s Blindness and the Blind (1872). Gower’s poetry offers a compelling early model of disability-centered poetics, reorienting English literary tradition and reception history through blindness as well as foregrounding the intimacy of authors and readers.

This chapter examines first-person writings by the deaf Spanish medieval nun Teresa de Cartagena. Arboleda de los enfermos (Grove of the Infirm) narrates Teresa’s movement from worldly chatter into a space of silence, alluding to her becoming deaf after entering a monastery. Reframing silence as a disciplined practice and divine gift, Teresa expands the expressive power of monastic sign lexicons (codified lists of gestures in lieu of speech), noting her dual exclusion from university environments due to her deafness and gender. Teresa’s second major work, Admiraçión operum Dey (Wonder at the Works of God), experiments with cross-disability metaphor through the spiritual trope of a blind man. Through her transformative rhetoric, Teresa envisions a collective of “infirm” people that anticipates coalitional thinking in disability activism today. This discussion incorporates perspectives from Deaf Studies, intersectional feminism, and contemporary Deaf activist groups who use modern media to reclaim Teresa as a “foremother” for their community.

This chapter explores writings by Thomas Hoccleve, a medieval London scribe whose recovery from a “wilde infirmite” (wild infirmity), followed by intense social isolation, profoundly shapes his poignant first-person lyric poetry. Hoccleve’s Compleinte and Series narrate the combined impacts of visual impairment, mental health crises, and social stigma, and his works anticipate some modern insights from Critical Disability Studies in theorizing the harms of professional norms and social expectations of labor and productivity. The chapter interweaves three strands: Hoccleve’s preoccupation with his facial appearance and the medieval social meanings of eyeglasses; the interplay between physical labor and his mental state; and the relevance of his poetry for readers and theorists associated with Mad Studies (an academic field that centers those who live with depression, neurodivergence, or mental illness). Hoccleve’s deeply personal meditations offer valuable insights into disability, labor, and community, revealing how medieval perspectives can enrich current conversations about unwellness and belonging.

This chapter examines dynamic networks of mutual support and caregiving in The Book of Margery Kempe, the spiritual narrative of an English housewife turned mystic, pilgrim, and traveler. Composed through oral dictation, the Book recounts Kempe’s experiences of chronic illness, aging, and care, including a remarkable meeting with Julian of Norwich to discuss their shared visionary experiences. Kempe’s encounters with disability – especially among “lepers” (likely women with Hansen’s disease) near her own hometown – reveal a radical identification with marginalized people, portraying them not as passive recipients of care but as agents of social change. The Book challenges dominant religious and medical models, suggesting how chronic illness creates intimacy and fosters community. Revisiting Teresa de Cartagena as Kempe’s near contemporary, this chapter interweaves intersectional feminist scholarship with crip theory to show how both authors use their lived experience to resist patriarchal authority and create care-based networks anticipating modern principles of Disability Justice.

This chapter uses Amis’s memoir Experience and his final novel Inside Story to examine rhetorical conventions about autobiography and autofiction. It surveys broader themes of authenticity and affectation in the works through more localised issues of identity construction. Both books extend identity across a spectrum that spans bodily, performative, and affective selves. Using ideas from genre history, queer theory, affect theory, and masculinity studies, the chapter answers the investigative question of why Amis, at the end of his long, distinguished career, didn’t write another memoir but opted instead for autofiction.

In this autobiographical chapter, Musa Sadr recounts the Sadr family’s lineage of religious scholars and his initial reluctant entry into religious studies at his father’s urging, later combining it with law. Still, his dedication to religious leadership stems from his belief in the unique position of Shiʿi scholars to serve their community. When he moves in the late 1950s to Tyre, Lebanon, following an invitation to succeed the local religious leader Imam Abdul Hussein Sharafeddin, he is guided by the principle that religion should serve life by addressing social, cultural and health concerns. This conviction leads him to the establishment of the Supreme Islamic Shiʿi Council (SISC) in 1969 to represent the Shiʿi community in Lebanon.

This chapter investigates how the African American autobiography is in itself a unique subgenre within the genre of nonfiction. It explores how the African American autobiography intricately weaves together intensely personal elements of the authors’ lives with the larger forces of historical changes. The specific autobiographies that I discuss were works that were published between the 1940s and 1960s, a time bookended by World War II and the Civil Rights Movement. These texts are Langston Hughes’ The Big Sea, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks, and Ezra Bells’ American Daughter. This essay explores how these writers’ lives, dreams, and dreams deferred are largely defined by their identities as Americans of color in a racially stratified America.

It is little wonder that Los Angeles, a city of compulsive self-narration, has birthed a tradition of autobiographical literature with local particularities. A uniquely LA tradition of memoir, autobiography, and autofiction come to the fore in this chapter. Allmendinger identifies three key strands of LA life writing: the Hollywood tell-all (Barbara Payton, Christina Crawford), the gang memoir, (Rafael Pérez-Torres, Freddy Negrete) and a third, more diffuse grouping – writings by women in which frank and personal explorations of gender and sexuality predominate (Eve Babitz, Maggie Nelson, Wendy C. Ortiz). While these three forms of reflection on lives lived in Los Angeles appear disparate, Allmendinger identifies in them a shared refusal of (White, male, straight) “master” narratives of Southern Californian consciousness.

Chapter 5 offers a new reading of Cuba’s most famous enslaved writer, Juan Francisco Manzano, who started publishing in 1821 and became legally free in 1836. While it engages with his well-known autobiography, the chapter focuses on his poetry. To the degree that slavery was justified through race, Manzano’s emergence as an author produced racial doubt among those who believed that poetry and literary skills were the exclusive domain of white people. At the same time, he explicitly disidentified from blackness, prompting many generations of critics to discuss how Black he was. As new generations return to his texts, the palimpsest of conflicting ideas about his Blackness or lack thereof keeps changing. The chapter examines some of these layers by focusing on the paradox of enslaved authorship – of a writer who built his authority on the basis of his deauthorization. Poems, the chapter shows, were Manzano’s most elaborate literary form of back talk, as they allowed him to evade the abolitionist pressure to write about slavery.

There is an autobiographical turn in Elizabeth Bowen’s writing in the 1940s and 1950s, which can be traced to the aftermath of the Second World War and the postwar losses that she experienced with the death of her husband and the selling and razing of her ancestral home. Rather than writing a straightforward autobiography, Bowen filters her personal writing into semi-autobiographical fictional characters and into other life-writing genres such as essays, family histories, and travel books. In two such works, a family history, Bowen’s Court, and a travel book, A Time in Rome , Bowen refuses to present identity as an independent, self-directed entity. Instead, she focuses on architecture and the built environment in order to show how houses, hotels, streets, and monuments shape her sense of self into shifting forms. These spaces are never neutral containers. In gothic fashion, Bowen’s places and spaces exert an influence of their own, not merely revealing the shape of the self, but forming it in their own image. Writing about these places after the Second World War, Bowen creates an autobiography of ruins, describing what happens when we lose the spaces that once defined our sense of self.

This chapter highlights the relationship between celebrity, sexual identity, and a star’s “authenticity” in gay celebrity autobiography. Authenticity is achieved in celebrity autobiographies when the reader perceives they are receiving personal information about a star or, ideally, that the star is participating in this revelation of private details. For gay celebrities, this personal information includes a recounting of the star’s coming out as gay. Coming out is performative and personal; it establishes intimacy with the reader and adheres to expectations for a celebrity’s media-mediated “revelation.” The coming-out story establishes the gay celebrity as vulnerable and relatable to gay readers and allows heterosexual readers to connect to gay subject matter through the revelatory nature of confession. The autobiographical form gives the celebrity control over the coming-out story as he “outs” himself, earmarking the “revelation” as the star “being himself” for his readers, giving them an exclusive that exists outside of the hollow construct of fame. Gay celebrity autobiography represents an inclusive visibility for both the writer and the reader even as the confessional space of the autobiography itself may also be an illusion in which truth and authenticity are queered through the form of the autobiography itself.

Given the paradoxical media environment for gay athletes and the struggle they face in shaping their own stories, the sports autobiography offers a rich and understudied site to trace the evolution of gay athlete stories in the media. This chapter analyzes five of the most prominent gay athlete autobiographies to date, told over a three-decade time period from 1977 to 2007, to reveal the discourses athletes use to construct their identities surrounding sport, sexuality, athleticism, and identity. The project offers a comparative analysis of the major themes that emerged in gay athlete autobiographies and how these stories were shaped over time and across different cultural and sporting contexts.

In spite of queer theory’s capacities to read texts by authors that do not identify or fall under the description of queerness, queerness and biography are often implicitly conjoined. This chapter interrogates why this might be the case by turning to the archive of interwar American autobiography, examining such authors as Hart Crane, Carter Bealer, Ralph Werther, José Garcia Villa, Glenway Wescott, Donald Vining, and others. In so doing, it provides an account of the logics and modalities of expression employed by these writers in the early decades of the twentieth century.

This chapter explore five works of gay literary autobiographical writing about the 1970s. These autobiographies by Michael Rumaker, Robert Glück, Kevin Killian, Essex Hemphill, and Bernard Cooper paint an ambivalent picture of the decade, a period in which the unprecedented rewards and celebratory tenor of sexual liberation did not merely erase the traumas of the past: homophobia, self-hatred, and abusive relationships. Most of these writers are quite different from one another; they belonged to different gay cultural scenes and lived and worked in different cities across the US. By identifying shared themes across their work, however, this chapter illuminates why the 1970s was a pivotal moment in the formation of gay literature as we know it.

Focusing on (auto)biographical modes of life-writing and how they engage with risky masquerade, Chapter 2 examines writings of avant-garde French writers Michel Leiris and Antonin Artaud, both dissident French Surrealists who took enormous interest and personal risks in exploring all forms of alterity. The chapter starts with Leiris’s writing on spirit possession in L’Afrique fantôme (1934). Leiris equates autobiography with ‘la tauromachie’ (‘bullfighting’), positing it as a deadly contest between the self as subject and self as object of writing. This notion is repeated and transformed by malleable bodies exemplified by the notorious Roman emperor Heliogabalus in Artaud’s hagiographical text Héliogabale (1934), who demonstrates the plasticity – namely, the capacity for transformation – of masquerade. Read together, Leiris and Artaud establish the masquerader as a recurrent figure in life-writing that generates a potentially infinite chain of mimeses. Through the figure of the masquerader as risk-taker and role-player, which also extends into Chapter 3, this chapter proposes the critical method of chain comparison.