Book Review: It’s Just Nerves: Notes on a Disability by Kelly Davio

Reviewed by Sarah Appleton

It’s Just Nerves: Notes on a Disability
Essays by Kelly Davio
Squares and Rebels, October 2017
$17.98; 133 pp.
ISBN: 978-1-941960-06-6

To say that Kelly Davio’s account of being a disabled person is “humanizing” gets at the very point she makes in each of the essays in It’s Just Nerves: Notes on a Disability—there’s no humanizing those who are already human, there’s just the compulsion for the able-bodied person to do so. Somehow, despite her years of living in an able-bodied world with myasthenia gravis (an immune-nerve disorder that causes extreme muscle fatigue, difficulty walking, and slurred speech among many, many other things), Davio manages not to be accusatory and hostile when she has so many reasons why she might be. This book is not a tirade, but it does lay bare her experiences in a way that makes the reader uncomfortable, and rightly so, as she coaches them to see how her daily experiences differ from theirs.

One of the most painful moments takes place when Davio is at an AWP conference. She brings with her a newly purchased green paisley cane, an acquisition she was initially reluctant to make, but which she now rejoices in. “I love my new cane,” Davio writes. “I could stand up more quickly, walk across a parking lot without beefing it in front of an oncoming SUV, and get across tricky rooms without having to hold on to walls like a creeping insect…Who knew a fifteen-dollar piece of aluminum could do all that?” This description of her “monumentally improved” life demonstrates the humor and snark Davio ladles into her essays, which works both to curb the assumption that a disabled person’s tale is either woeful and self-pitying or else solely inspirational. We can laugh a little along with Davio, just as she and her husband laugh about his gymnastic score ratings of her frequent falls at home. And along with Davio, the reader can begin to feel that she is making it, that she is not some oddity hobbling down the hallways of the conference’s hotel. Slipping into a panel discussion, she hears one of the speakers say, “…as the writer Kelly Davio said….” For a minute, we exalt with Davio and her “new feeling that [she] was somebody—despite being an unrecognizable, cane-hobbling shade of [herself].” Then, just as quickly as the feeling comes, a man punches Davio in the back, hard, between the shoulder blades, which sends her sprawling. Fellow writers attending the conference stare for a moment then go back about their business. No one but the attacker, who laughed as she fell, helps her back to her feet. The moment is both humiliating and horrifying. “This is the story of how I learned I wasn’t The Writer Kelly Davio any longer. I wasn’t someone to quote—I was something to walk over,” Davio surmises. She ends the essay: “Who knew a fifteen-dollar piece of aluminum could do all that?” In the span of a few pages, Davio so deftly carries the reader through her own triumphs and blows, forcing the reader to examine how they might have acted differently, if at all, in the situation, and to reconsider their own views on the disabled body.

This collection makes clear, however, that she still is the writer Kelly Davio. While myasthenia gravis may have compromised her nerves and muscles, it does not debilitate her ability to reveal to readers just how ableist our culture really is. In a culture sensitive to triggering language, Davio points out that we still demean the disabled in other colloquialisms. “How often do we read that someone is ‘blind’ to facts, ‘deaf’ to tone, ‘lame’ in behavior, ‘crippled by fear, or ‘paralyzed’ by doubt?” Davio asks. “Even our metaphors are steeped in the ridicule of people who don’t fit an entrenched view of normality.”

Discussing her illness, Davio says, is restricted or else taboo. In her essay reflecting on David Bowie’s silence leading up to his death from cancer, “If We Learned Anything from David Bowie,” Davio examines the public’s reaction to illness. She writes,

If you are going to disclose your illness, our culture tells us, you had better do it in such a way as to make other people feel gratitude for their own good health, to take advantage of their robust bodies, to dredge up [a] peppy feeling…It typically involves a great many 5k runs with graphic t-shirts, and words like ‘battle’ and ‘courage’ used liberally. The brute facts of your existence should make others feel lucky not to be you.

But on the flipside, she points out, this role the public demands of the sick person is exhausting, a kind of performance art. Silence, maybe, is the easier, more respectable option, because talking “about a bad body, that’s complaining. That’s asking others to relate to something they don’t want any part of. That’s to become a grim image in a mirror held up to mortality.”

Regardless of whether she speaks publically about her illness, Davio’s disability strips her of privacy in other ways. “My body is a public place,” Davio writes in “Fall Risk.” Confined to the hospital for a case of meningitis induced by donor plasma, Davio says that “[t]he first lesson of the hospital is that the body belongs to everyone assigned to its care.” Stripped of ownership over her own body, Davio says, “Anyone who comes into my room is allowed to touch me, to reach a hand down my gown and root around with a stethoscope, to shove at my head to see if my neck will move.” Strange men touch her all the time. She’s subjected to a battery of tests regularly. Surviving her illness sometimes means she has to undergo barbaric procedures. Her body, already out of her command given her disorder, is further stripped from her by the medical system she must utilize in order to live.

Just as she’s stripped of her privacy by dint of having a sick body, culture excludes Davio from embodying her gender. In her essay “Strong is the New Sexy,” Davio writes, “I was never a curvy woman to begin with, but with each of the more feminine attributes I’ve lost, I’ve become, I am given to understand, less and less of a real woman.” Instead, “real women” are women who can breathe mindfully during yoga, Davio says in “Mindfulness Is for Healthy People”; Davio’s neurologist, on the other hand, reminds her that the in-and-out of air is “‘how myasthenia patients die.’” “Real women” are those juxtaposed with the trappings of the disabled. Davio sees this in an ad in which an elegant woman leans against forearm crutches. The catch—she uses the crutches to prevent herself from falling from her towering heels. Davio sees this again in Interview magazine’s cover with Kylie Jenner in a golden wheelchair. “The idea is that beauty and disability are opposites,” Davio explains, “and that it’s artistic to juxtapose them for effect.” Davio, then, is positioned on the other side of beauty and femininity.

Beauty aside, Davio’s decision not to become a mother—a near impossible feat for a multitude of reasons—also negates her gender. “So here I am,” she writes in “You Have Kids, Right?”, “a great failure of modern womanhood. The person who hasn’t fulfilled—and won’t ever fulfill—her biological endgame. A woman whose own biology has gotten away from her.” In addition to having her image and biology maligned, the media seldom acknowledges people like her. But if the media does, they’re portrayed like Hazel in John Greene’s The Fault in Our Stars, a beautiful girl who looks stunning in a nosepiece and—incredibly unrealistically—lets the germs of a little girl cover her nosepiece just so the girl can see that being sick isn’t so terrifying after all. Portrayals like Hazel frustrate Davio. “I think it’s fair to want to see those characters treated not as sad cases or as life-enriching educational resources but as people,” Davio writes “Girls on Oxygen,” “human beings made up of the same stuff as everyone else, occupying the same space as everyone else, breathing the same air, even if it comes through a plastic tube and nosepiece.” Misrepresented by the media, depicted as the opposite of beauty in advertisements, and childless, Davio wonders “at what point [she] will become unreal altogether.”

But Davio is very much real, and fortunately, she does not stay silent. The insight she provides is both shocking and immeasurable. Arguably, her collection should be required reading. While the focus of the collection is on living with myasthenia gravis, the collection also embodies other aspects of her life: Davio’s experience living in London during Brexit, the UK’s socialized health care system, losing all of her possessions in a fire, and the effects of the cult-like church she was raised in and left as an adult. The greatest impact of the collection, though, comes from Davio’s searing dissection of ableist culture, in which she is “not going to be able to convince insurers that [her] life is worth preserving.” She does, however, very much affirm her worth and the worth of every disabled person. “This may be my own bias,” she writes, “but I believe we sick people are as capable of meaningful living—and as capable of loving and being loved—as anybody.”

Sarah Appleton earned her MFA in creative nonfiction at Western Washington University. Her writing projects focus on memory, family, and feminism. She currently teaches at Cranbrook Kingswood School, where she lives with her fiancé and beautiful Australian Shepherd, Zoë. You can find her @sarahkapples on Twitter.