James with his first book What Happened to You. What Happened to You? features
Joe, who like James has one leg, and the repeated interrogations he faces about how he lost it. Like James, Joe refuses to discuss it. James says that he wanted to highlight the difficulty in always being expected to educate others – a burden that is often placed on disabled people. Lucy points out that “disabled children need permission to not answer. They need to be given that permission by the adults around them. When you answer that question as a disabled person, you either have to divulge personal medical information, or you have to rebuff someone’s attempt at social interaction – and either way you are both going to feel awkward.” Another common response to disability is explored in the follow- up, You’re So Amazing!. While What Happened To You? is about young children’s curiosity, You’re so Amazing! looks at how adults and older children often either pity disabled people, or view them as inspirational.
James, who played football as a child and went on to represent England’s amputee team, says: “As someone who has always had one leg, and who has
Spring-Summer 2023
always been told that he was amazing for being able to kick a football, it would have been very easy to accept that narrative of being amazing, along with the message that ‘disabled people can do anything, it’s just a state of mind!’. But even if you try to resist that narrative, there are worse ones out there. If I run around, I’m inspirational. But if I sit down, I’m much more likely to be pitied.
“For instance, If I answer the door to the person who delivers the supermarket
shop, I can either sit on the floor and unpack the shopping, which is much easier for me; or I can stand and bend down to do it, which is harder. The latter appears more heroic. The former is just practical – but it also runs the risk of attracting sympathy. Those two narratives inform my daily life in almost every single interaction with a stranger. Joe, in You’re so Amazing! is constantly having to reckon with one or the other.” Both You’re so Amazing! and What Happened to You? were collaborative. James says: “Making these books feels like the culmination of a conversation Lucy and I have been having since we first met – since we started talking together about the differences between our experiences of disability.
“Did we learn anything new? There was a distillation and clarity that emerged from writing it down, and it was probably that process that made this binary narrative of pity and inspiration fully clear. Having to pin these ideas down on the page does force you to resolve your thinking.”
For both Lucy and James, lived experience plays a crucial part in changing how disabled people are depicted in books.
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