Amanda Leduc’s essays and stories have appeared in publications across Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. She is the author of the novels The Miracles of Ordinary Men and the forthcoming The Centaur’s Wife. She has cerebral palsy and lives in Hamilton, Ontario, where she works as the Communications Coordinator for the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD), Canada’s first festival for diverse authors and stories.
In Disfigured, Amanda Leduc looks at fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm to Disney, showing us how they influence our expectations and behaviour and linking the quest for disability rights to new kinds of stories that celebrate difference.
Interviewed by Sandra Maxson.
Sandra Maxson (SM): Disfigured is a fascinating blend of the history of fairy tales, an exploration of ableism, misogyny and other biases through time, reflections on the power of storytelling and writing, contemporary cultural insights, personal memoir, and medical lesson. Did these elements come together organically, or did you start the book with a plan in mind?
Amanda Leduc (AL): I did originally have a plan for the book—but, as doubtless many other writers will agree, that plan ended up shifting significantly in the course of writing it. I had originally intended for the book to be much more a work of cultural criticism, but as I began writing it the personal, memoir side of it was woven in almost immediately. From the very beginning it was clear that the book wanted to be about my own journey through the forest of fairy tales and disability, and instead of fighting that urge I let it lead me where it wanted to go. I’m so grateful I did, too, because the act of writing the book this way helped me realize so many things about myself that were joys to discover and experience.
SM: In the book you talk often about the fact that fairy tales both reflect the societal bias toward a very narrow idea of perfection and reinforce that bias. But story telling can be an incredible tool for perspective-taking with the power to immerse the reader in diverse realities. In that way, the potential for fairy tales to inspire compassion and understanding for – rather than pity for or fear of – others is immense. Yet, as you point out, that needle has moved slowly, if at all. Is there hope for the genre in the current social and political context?
AL: I do think that there is a great deal of hope for the genre. Over the last couple of years especially we’ve seen a real rise in the kind of “revisionist storytelling” of some of the great fairy tales we know in Western culture—and a lot of this writing has been done by disabled people in particular. Disabled writers working in the realms of science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction have contributed so much to the genre—anthologies like Unbroken: 13 Stories Starring Disabled Teens (edited by Marieke Nijkamp) and On The Edge of Gone by Corinne Duyvis—are wonderful examples of these kinds of re-imagined stories, and I’m really encouraged to see new stories and books by disabled authors coming to the forefront.
Having said that, I think there are important conversations that we need to keep having around fairy tales in particular and the cultural hold that they have on the imagination. Fairy tales have survived for so long because they are both malleable and immutable at once—they can be updated to reflect the current times and thus stay relevant, and they also have familiar archetypes that stay the same, so the narratives are comforting to read. But I think we need to push back against what makes these structures so comfortable, and to question what the simplified version of a “happy ending” so often means. Our actual lives don’t follow these kinds of cut-and-dried narratives, so we need to be able to interrogate fairy tales and think about how they enforce—however subtly!—certain social structures and expectations of behaviour. When it comes to disability in particular, I want to see readers asking themselves these questions. Why do we assume that the old hag is a witch? Why do we understand and accept that disability is meted out as punishment for bad behaviour? Why do we read and take for granted stories that posit a “happy ending” as one without disability—and, really, without difference of any kind? A new generation of fairy tales needs to engage with this lens.
SM: Disfigured weaves the academic analysis of disability and fairy tales (and other stories) with the cultural backdrop they reflect, and with a very candid telling of your lived experience as a disabled person. The vulnerability and authenticity you show in the inclusion of your own story allows the reader to access the academic reflections in a very deep way. Did that feel risky? Were you ever tempted to stay at a safer distance?
AL: I always feel odd saying this, but the memoir parts of the book were the easiest ones to write, and the parts that I was most comfortable inhabiting. I wanted Disfigured to showcase how the more removed, academic history of fairy tales had a very real, non-academic impact on the girl that I was and the person that I grew up to be. And the act of writing the book was itself a kind of reclamation—an understanding of and coming full circle with the disabled girl I once was, and the disabled woman I now am today. By the end of the book I was very proud of the memoir parts in particular, because they helped to remind me of who I was and the kind of writer that my disability had shaped into being.
If anything, I was nervous about the academic parts of the book. Because Disfigured inhabits a terrain in between memoir and academia, I worried that it wouldn’t feel “substantial”enough—that people would read the memoir parts and think that I hadn’t done enough research, or that I wasn’t delving deeply enough into disability activism within its pages in order to say something important. But the magic of Disfigured has, as it’s turned out, been this very in-between nature in the first place. It was the act of eschewing that academic distance that allowed me to go so completely into what the book was meant to be.
SM: In the introduction to Disfigured, you recount a sort of epiphany moment of seeing, suddenly and clearly, the intersection of fairy tales and other magical stories, with disability. But your novel The Miracles of Ordinary Men, published in 2013, delves deep into magic, metaphysics, and the body. How long do you think your subconscious has been tumbling these ideas?
AL: I love when people ask this question, because it’s so true, and it was—if you can believe it—something that I really wasn’t thinking about consciously until around five years or so ago. But subconsciously, when I look back on the stories I’ve written throughout my life and the narratives that I’ve always been drawn toward, it seems so obvious now that I have always, on some level, been writing about the body. About the body, about transformation, about becoming. When I was a child I wrote fairy tales and re-engineered them to put unconventional heroes at the centre; my short stories and novels over the past fifteen years have all been concerned with change and magic and becoming in some way or another. I’ve heard other writers talk about how writers often have major themes that they keep returning to, and I guess the body—and how it changes, and how it stays the same!—is always going to be one of mine. Which I suppose makes sense, doesn’t it. It’s the most magical thing that we have!