2024 IPPY Awards Gold Winner in Best First Book (Nonfiction/Personal) By age four, Claudia Marseille had hardly uttered a word. When her parents finally had her hearing tested and learned she had a severe hearing loss, they chose to mainstream her, hoping this would offer her the most 'normal' childhood possible. With the help of a primitive hearing aid, Claudia worked hard to learn to hear, lipread, and speak even as she tried to hide her disability in order to fit in. As a result, she was often misunderstood, lonely, and isolated - fitting into neither the hearing world nor the Deaf culture. This memoir explores Claudia's relationships with her German refugee parents - a disturbed, psychoanalyst father obsessed over various harebrained projects and moneymaking schemes and a Jewish mother who had survived the Holocaust in Munich - and with her own identity. Claudia shares how she emerged from loneliness and social isolation, explored her Jewish identity, struggled to find a career compatible with hearing loss, and eventually opened herself to a life of creativity and love. But You Look So Normal is the inspiring story of a life affected but not defined by an invisible disability. It is a journey through family, loss, shame, identity, love, and healing as Claudia finally, joyfully, finds her place in the world.
- ISBN10 164742626X
- ISBN13 9781647426262
- Publish Date 14 May 2024
- Publish Status Transferred
- Publish Country US
- Imprint She Writes Press
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 280
- Language English