Love You To Pieces, Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs

Join us in congratulating Suzanne Kamata, Literary Mama’s fiction co-editor, on the publication of Love You To Pieces, Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs, the first literary collection—fiction, essays, and poetry—on raising special-needs children. Available for pe-order at Amazon.com.

Responding to a dearth of literary writing on disability, Suzanne Kamata gathers parents’ perspectives at various stages in the lives of children with mental or physical difficulties. In these real and fictional stories, families cope with autism, deafness, retardation, muscular dystrophy, and more, laying bare the moments of rage, disappointment, and guilt that can color their relationships. Parent/child communication is a challenge at the best of times, but here we see the epic struggles and triumphs of those who speak their own language—or don’t speak at all—and those who love them.

Together, the authors—including Michael Bérubé, Jayne Anne Phillips, Penny Wolfson, Carol Zapata-Whelan, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, and Bret Lott—paint a beautiful, wrenchingly honest portrait of what it means to care for a child who does not experience the world as we do. The book serves as a site of quiet contemplation amid the swirling issues of medical research and disability rights, and the writers come clean about the complications of even the deepest love.