Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs [Paperback]

Suzanne Kamata (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2008

The first collection of literary writing on raising a child with special needs, Love You to Pieces features families coping with autism, deafness, muscular dystrophy, Down syndrome and more. Here, poets, memoirists, and fiction writers paint beautiful, wrenchingly honest portraits of caring for their children, laying bare the moments of rage, disappointment, and guilt that can color their relationships. Parent-child communication can be a challenge at the best of times, but in this collection we witness the struggles and triumphs of those who speak their own language-or don't speak at all-and those who love them deeply.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...the work acts as an eloquent support group for these parents. Highly recommended." --Library Journal

"Even for readers who are not parenting one of the 8 million babies born worldwide each year with genetic birth defects, this anthology offers something profound. " --Image Journal

" . . . a reminder of life's changeability; surprises occur and parents persevere, even in seemingly fixed situations." --Brain, Child

"[A] moving collection of well-crafted memoirs, fiction, and poetry that reflects the wild emotional complexities of living with and loving a child with disabilities." --Mothering

"[H]ard to put down...a must-read and definite keeper...all types of readers will glean something from [Love You to Pieces], be it insight, entertainment, or empathy." --Exceptional Parent

Powerful, unflinching, and beautifully rendered, Love You to Pieces is not just an anthology about raising children with special needs, but true literature. Through a combination of fiction, poetry, and memoir—some by renowned authors, others by emerging writers, every piece saturated with hard-won firsthand insight—the loving parents in these pages speak honestly and artfully about every stage of their experience, from the birth of a child with special needs to the arrival of grandchildren. Readers who also wear these shoes will find deep, moving depictions of a reality they know so well. Those with no knowledge of this world will find a literary experience they'll never forget. —Rachel Simon, author of Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

"Love You To Pieces is a unique reading experience: raw, moving, provocative and compelling. The stories are beautifully told, from many different backgrounds and perspectives, but taken together share a common and ultimately triumphant connecting thread: love conquers all."—Daniel Tammet, author of Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant

"Love You to Pieces is groundbreaking. Our public discourse about disability is dominated by the voices of medical professionals and fix your child tomes. These stories elevate the experience of people with disabilities to the level of literature. It is a must buy book for anyone who parents, educates, or supports young people with disabilities.—Jonathan Mooney, author of The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal

About the Author

Suzanne Kamata is fiction editor at the online magazine Literary Mama. Her essays, stories, and articles on parenting a disabled child - her daughter is deaf and has cerebral palsy -- have appeared or will appear in Utne Reader; Brain, Child; Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined; It's a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters; and an anthology on new family configurations to be published by Riverhead in 2007. Her anthology The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan was nominated for the Kiriyama Prize. Her work has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize, and her essay "The Sound and the Worry" was given a special mention in the latest Pushcart Prize anthology.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press; 1 edition (May 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807000302
• ISBN-13: 978-0807000304
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.9 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,291,164 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Required reading for any parent, July 15, 2008

By 

Sonya Huber "Sonya H" (Statesboro, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs (Paperback)

Suzanne Kamata's anthology offers a cross-genre and literary look into the heads and hearts of parents who work to raise children with special needs as they work to understand or accept their children's conditions, to challenge and accept views and needs of other family members, and to deal with social isolation and cultural silence about disability. What I most appreciated about this volume is the emotional range and vulnerability of the authors. In sharing their experiences, they raise larger social questions not just about disability but about the "normal" we all live in--as in Marie Myung-Ok Lee's excellent essay "Normal." The literary quality of the selections is impressive, including authors such as Bret Lott and Jayne Anne Phillips; I found the poetry to be of particularly high quality and insight.
It would be a mistake to see this as a book compiled for those raising children with special needs. Most parents--and most humans--must face deep fears about losing the abilities and mobilities that give us access to the range of these so-called normal human experience. For this reason, the poems, stories, and essays in Kamata's anthology will speak to any reader from a place of profound honesty, insight, and subtlety. Not a cup of comfort here, but a strong swallow of intelligence and perseverance.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful Yet Honest, April 30, 2008

By 

L. Lynette Mejia (Lafayette, LA, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs (Paperback)

Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs is a beautiful tribute the the lives of parents who every day deal with the fact that their lives have taken a different turn than planned. With stories and poems by Bret Lott, Carol Zapata-Whelan, Michael Berube and more, Suzanne Kamata has collected experiences from a wide range of disabilities, reflecting a broad set of emotions. Some of the stories told are fiction, some non-fiction, but each gives voice to the day-to-day lives of these families in an artful and unique way. As the parent of a special needs child, I find myself constantly seeking out books containing the comforting voices of others who deal with the same challenges I do, and this book is a welcome addition to my collection.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Honest thoughts on Raising a Special Needs Child, April 20, 2008

By 

Kaeli Vandertulip (Irving, TX USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs (Paperback)

Love you to Pieces is a collection of honest, raw, and emotional stories and poems about raising a special needs child. The disabilities the children have range from Fragile X and autism to Downs Syndrome and unspecified mental retardation. Rather than focus completely on the bad or the good, the mothers, fathers, and caretakers in these stories explain life in its small parts. They explain everyday things like trying to figure out what the speech delayed child wants right now to coming to terms with faith. Every stage in raising a special needs child is examines, from premature birth (and there are many in this book) to coping with sexuality.

The quality of stories is a bit uneven-some are touching and scream with their emotion. Some are just dull. But what is touching to one parent can leave another cold. I was actually comforted by the scene of a mother so frustrated with her autistic daughter she actually beat her (made me feel like I wasn't that bad for punching the crap out of my pillow when my son gets to me), but it annoyed me to read about how one mother not only raised her child with spina bifida, but helped a mentally retarded child as a form of penence (though I did love it when she started whailing on cabinetry).

This realistic look into the minds of the parent of special needs children is an excellent read for special ed teachers, parents, or anyone who should know how a parent copes. I would have liked to see more from the perspective of the fathers, though. And I hope this book inspires more publishers to produce works like this. I'm torn between wanting to just read about other parents dealing with autism and wanting to see the perspective of the other parents I meet at Special Ed night at my son's school.