Skip to main content
Trade Books For Courses Tradebooks for Courses

I Live a Life Like Yours

A Memoir

Jan Grue; Translated from the Norwegian by B. L. Crook

FSG Originals

opens in a new window
opens in a new window I Live a Life Like Yours Download image

ISBN10: 0374600783
ISBN13: 9780374600785

Trade Paperback

272 Pages

$17.00

CA$23.00

Request Desk Copy
Request Exam Copy

TRADE BOOKS FOR COURSES NEWSLETTER

Sign up to receive information about new books, author events, and special offers.

Sign up now

Longlisted for the Barbellion Prize

I am not talking about surviving. I am not talking about becoming human, but about how I came to realize that I had always already been human. I am writing about all that I wanted to have, and how I got it. I am writing about what it cost, and how I was able to afford it.

Jan Grue was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy at the age of three. Shifting between specific periods of his life—his youth with his parents and sister in Norway; his years of study in Berkeley, St. Petersburg, and Amsterdam; and his current life as a professor, husband, and father—he intersperses these histories with elegant, astonishingly wise reflections on the world, social structures, disability, loss, relationships, and the body: in short, on what it means to be human. Along the way, Grue moves effortlessly between his own story and those of others, incorporating reflections on philosophy, film, art, and the work of writers from Joan Didion to Michael Foucault. He revives the cold, clinical language of his childhood, drawing from a stack of medical records that first forced the boy who thought of himself as “just Jan” to perceive that his body, and therefore his self, was defined by its defects.

I Live a Life Like Yours is a love story. It is rich with loss, sorrow, and joy, and with the details of one life: a girlfriend pushing Grue through the airport and forgetting him next to the baggage claim; schoolmates forming a chain behind his wheelchair on the ice one winter day; his parents writing desperate letters in search of proper treatment for their son; his own young son climbing into his lap as he sits in his wheelchair, only to leap down and run away too quickly to catch. It is a story about accepting one’s own body and limitations, and learning to love life as it is while remaining open to hope and discovery.

Reviews

Praise for I Live a Life Like Yours

"This is uniquely Jan Grue’s story, one in which he endeavors to fit his extraordinary shape into an ordinary world. It is a narrative that is compelling, unconventional and powerfully told . . . From behind the veil of disability, he shares valuable insight about the human condition. Do pay attention to that man behind the curtain. He has a lot to say."—Michael J. Fox, The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)

"A quietly brilliant book that warms slowly in the hands."—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“[Grue's] book—which doubles as a work of literary criticism and cultural history—is, yes, an elegant meditation on what it’s like to be a body that does not resemble most other bodies, but it’s also about aging, parenthood, memory, academia, and love. A tart and spare palate cleanser.”—Molly Young, Vulture

"Jan Grue's superb book encompasses memoir, ideas and travel. It upends received wisdom about disability. It testifies to an uncrushable spirit and an ordinary, extraordinary family. It is humbling, dark, bright, defiant, smart, generous andin its courteous Norwegian wayrevolutionary."David Mitchell, author of Utopia Avenue

"Jan Grue’s I Live a Life like Yours is the story of a journey from a childhood lived under a medical diagnosis that predicted a life diminished by disability to an adulthood replete with fulfilling work, family, and life that undoes the expectations the world presses upon those of us who live with disabilities. Along the way, Grue moves from the confines of what the doctors and teachers expect from a boy whose diagnosis is a story of an uncertain future, to the truly open future that Grue finds in books, art, love, and the eager surge toward life. The story of a life lived well with disabilities is a surprise to almost everyone who thinks of themselves as free from the limitations many of us assume disability inevitably brings. All of us, whether we consider ourselves disabled or nondisabled, will understand more fully what it means to be human if we accompany Jan Grue in his rich travels from his story of limitation to his story of fulfillment."Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Professor Emerita of English and bioethics at Emory University and co-editor of About Us: Essays from the New York Times about Disability by People with Disabilities

"In this nuanced and beautiful book, Jan Grue takes us on both an experiential and intellectual journey through disability. In the process he offers us doorways into reimagining a world where disability is welcomed and vulnerability supported. I Live a Life Like Yours is one of those rare books you won't be able to put down, yet will want to return to again and again to random pages for the insights and reflections they offer. A gift to read, and a fabulous addition to the long tradition of disabled people transforming the world through autobiography."—Sunaura Taylor, artist and author of Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

"Grue is not in the defensive position of justifying his existence as a disabled body but instead he is engaged in a rich investigation of the (medical, intellectual and emotional) language of his past and how it has shaped his sense of self. This is a voice that has found inventive ways to imagine and frame disability and difference."—Raymond Antrobus, author of the Rathbones Folio Prize-Winning The Perseverance

"A remarkable reflection on disability and differenceparenthood, the body, and the self. Essential reading for anyone troubled by the question of whether or not they'll ever be able to feel like a human being."—Tom Whyman, author of Infinitely Full of Hope

"I Live a Life Like Yours is quietly but insistently radical, a book which demands space and leaves change behind. As both an attempt to elucidate the specific details of a life seen from inside, and an examination of the limits of such an attempt, it is both beautiful and captivating."—Jessie Greengrass, author of Sight and The High House

“A sensitive examination of the meaning of disability . . . Frank and often moving . . . Absorbing, insightful reflections on being human.”Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Lyrical . . . A gentle recollection of a life in which disability appears to be no match for tenacity."—Tony Miksanek, Booklist

"Grue elegantly flows between memoir, essay, and intellectual discourse in this magnificent story about living with a disability . . . He brilliantly articulates what it’s like to be 'erased and rewritten,' and, more poignantly, what it’s like to obliterate the narrative one’s been handed. This stunning work isn’t to be missed."Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Reviews from Goodreads

BOOK EXCERPTS

Read an Excerpt

From time to time I cross paths with someone who knew me as a child but never expected to meet me as an adult. Out of common courtesy, they are usually able to conceal their surprise at seeing me out in the world until an opening, a gap in the conversation,...

About the author

Jan Grue; Translated from the Norwegian by B. L. Crook

Jan Grue is the author of a wide-ranging body of work in fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, and academic literature, and a professor at the University of Oslo. I Live a Life Like Yours was published in 2018 in Norway, where it won the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature and was nominated to the Nordic Council Literature Prize, the first Norwegian nonfiction book to be so honored in fifty years.

B. L. Crook is a writer and literary translator. In 2010, she founded SAND, an English literary journal, in Berlin. She led creative writing workshops in the Netherlands for two years before returning to the United States. She lives with her family on an island near Seattle.

NTB scanpix/Sipa USA

Read Author Biography at University of Oslo