Writing her own story

Sarah Anderson’s bookshop featured in Notting Hill. As her life story is published, she talks to Ian Macrae

Sarah Anderson, who’s just written a book on her life, is a mass of contradictions. For a start, the book itself represents something of a u-turn for her.

“For most of my life I’ve avoided talking about having one arm. I don’t think about having one arm. It doesn’t affect my life, I do whatever I want.”

But the desire to write the book was born out of the way in which she feels she’s regarded by other people.

“It’s about what other people think is important and I wanted to let other people know what it’s like living with one arm.”

There are contradictions, too, surrounding her identity as a disabled person. She’s on the record as saying that she doesn’t regard herself as disabled and yet she often writes like someone who’s got the social model tattooed on her soul. And she readily accepts the view that it’s society not impairments which disable us.

“I would certainly agree with that. But when I hear the word ‘disabled’, it means ‘un-able’, and I don’t reckon that I am ‘un-able’. I would say that I’m different. That there are certain things I can’t do.”

As the owner of a famous London travel book shop – the one run by Hugh Grant in the movie Notting Hill – she’s well placed to compare attitudes in different cultures.

“People in Britain I find incredibly embarrassed and they get completely tied up in knots. Whereas in America the attitude is far more open.”

Exploring people’s attitudes towards her reveals another set of contradictions, or maybe it’s the same one. Reflecting on a story in the book when a man refused to open a door for her despite the fact that she was carrying books and had explained to him that she had one arm, she says: “I wish it could make me angry. It doesn’t. It makes me very upset.”

So why does she get upset rather than angry?

“It’s always been very difficult for me to ask for help because I know that I can do most things. So when I do have to ask for help, to have someone refuse it, I’m completely taken aback. I can’t deal with it.”

I wonder then whether she understands those of us who do sometimes get angry.

“Yes, I do. It’s almost as if you’re not there as a person. You are your blindness; you are your one-armedness. You’re not a person.”

I can’t help thinking that, when you get to the core of Sarah Anderson, there is, perhaps, just a kernel of anger and a bit of a sense of injustice, too.