Institutional echoes

Shortlisted for two major literary awards, Grace Williams Says It Loud by Emma Henderson could easily disappoint the discerning disabled reader. But, says Agnes Fletcher, instead it strikes a number of chords

This is a wonderful book – funny, elegantly written and disturbingly evocative of what it means to be trapped: as much within a brutal institution as by a body that won’t do all that you would like it to.

A mainstream novel, with a social model message, Grace Williams Says It Loud was shortlisted for the 2010 Wellcome Trust Book Prize and for the 2011 Orange Prize.

When she is born in 1947, Grace is reduced to a set of malfunctioning body parts by a doctor: “Club foot. Mangled face. Malformation of the skull and spine.” She is diagnosed as “feeble-minded”. But, as the story is told by Grace herself in an ironic and intelligent first person, the reader knows from the start that this isn’t true.

At 10, she is still tiny enough for a baby swing - dangling miserably, her family convinced that: “It makes her feel a part of things.” The novel’s central conceit is this incongruity between Grace’s vivid inner life and the perceptions of most of those around her. The contrast is between her actual voice: sentences made up solely of two syllables – “More, more,” “Leg-up” (meaning leg-over), “Grace here” – and her energetic, perceptive inner voice.

Debut novelist Emma Henderson, whose own disabled sister was institutionalised, captures the attitudes of the time. Grace’s well-meaning parents deliver her to the Briar Mental Institute at the age of 11, where the staff think the patients are “disgusting” and the male nurses carry sticks.

On her first day there, Grace meets Daniel, who has epilepsy and lost his arms in a car accident. There is romance, inventive crip sex – and heartbreak.

Daniel is Grace’s friend and lover but, as a patient himself, can’t protect her from the awful medical procedures and physical, emotional and sexual abuse she experiences at Briar. But Henderson’s novel is no grand guignol melodrama – there are some empathetic members of staff, as well as people outside the institution who interact more positively with her.

This is, in a way, the novel that I’ve waited 18 years for. One that brings the social model, which changed my own worldview all those years ago, very effectively to life in a captivating, inventive, utterly believable way. There is no disability sector jargon, just a wonderfully engaging narrative and a “voice” for Grace that makes you want her – as your sister or a friend.