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Autobiography / Disability / Medicine / Journalism

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How I Became a Human Being A Disabled Man's Quest for Independence Mark O'Brien, with Gillian Kendall Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography William L. Andrews, General Editor "The whole disability revolution has come as a surprise. This book shows how that revolution freed me to become a human being, and how that revolution made a society become more human."—Mark O'Brien, from the prologue September 1955. Six-year-old Mark O'Brien moved his arms and legs for the last time. He came out of a thirty-day coma to find himself enclosed from the neck down in an iron lung, the machine in which he would live for much of the rest of his life. How I Became a Human Being is Mark O'Brien's account of his struggles to lead an independent life despite a lifelong disability. In 1955, he contracted polio and became permanently paralyzed from the neck down. O'Brien describes growing up without the use of his limbs, his adolescence struggling with physical rehabilitation and suffering the bureaucracy of hospitals and institutions, and his adult life as an independent student and writer. Despite his weak physical state, O'Brien attended graduate school, explored his sexuality, fell in love, published poetry, and worked as a journalist. A determined writer, O'Brien used a mouthstick to type each word. O'Brien's story does not beg for sympathy. It is rather a day-to-day account of his reality—the life he crafted and maintained with a good mind, hired attendants, decent legislation for disabled people in California, and support from the University of California at Berkeley. He describes the ways in which a paralyzed person takes care of the body, mind, and heart. What mattered most was his writing, the people he loved, his belief in God, and his belief in himself. Mark O'Brien was the subject of the 1997 Academy Award–winning documentary Breathing Lessons. He was a published poet and cofounder of the Lemonade Factory, a California press that published poetry by people with disabilities. O'Brien died in 1999 at the age of forty-nine after completing a draft of How I Became a Human Being . Gillian Kendall is a writer. She has contributed to both Outright Radio and Sun magazine; one of her short stories appeared in The Student Body, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

March 2003 278 pp.      13 b/w photos     6 x 9 ISBN 0-299-18430-7   Cloth $29.95t To order, you can accumulate titles in the Shopping Cart by clicking on the bulleted lines below. You can submit your order electronically, paying for it with MasterCard or Visa. Click here for further explanation of shopping cart feature. Never ordered from us before? Read this first.

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