Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio (review)

After seven years of studying the cultural criticism of disability representation I approach an autobiography with a good measure of trepidation. As I turn the first page I wonder how it will navigate the fine and blurry lines between “triumphing over” and “wallowing in” tragedy. I worry that if it tries to avoid both it may merely fall flat between the two. I wish for it to find a miraculous line of flight and take me somewhere new. It did not take long for me to realise that within the pages of Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio it would be my wonderings and wishes that would triumph over my worries.

This is an eloquent ode to living through impairment, an ode to life infused from all sides by the joys and sorrows, the gentle ironies and the bleak contradictions of disability. From poop to unconditional love, from urinals to the debate over assisted suicide, Gary Presley takes us on a ride full of delicious and, more often than not, familiar detours. In a world where major book stores have large and prominently placed sections entitled “Tragic Life Stories”, this book resists offering a mainstream sanitised account. Seven Wheelchairs surprised me by spinning a tale in which it was familiarity that took me somewhere new.

It is written in a loose chronology with each of the 30 chapters pondering a certain issue, element, or period in time. We are told early in the Acknowledgements that “this book was a series of linked essays” (vii) and that does show in its sometimes jumbled and disproportionate nature; there are times when seemingly significant moments are curtailed while others, less noteworthy, are indulged and even exhausted. However, taken as a whole these chapters tell a powerful story, one which captures the experience of acquiring and living with impairment at a certain time in a certain place with authentic rawness and big dollops of all too necessary humour.

It begins in 1959 in Missouri where a 17-year-old Gary Presley receives a booster shot for polio. Seven days later Gary leaves basketball practice with a headache. After being relieved of his usual milking duty on his parents’ farm and told to take some more aspirin, he finds his way to bed. When he wakes he can no longer stand. A trip to the hospital and a procession of doctors and orderlies culminate in Gary being lifted into an iron lung, where he stays for three months. From here we are taken through the fever of polio, the months spent in that iron lung, the nights spent on a rocking bed, through feelings of anger and depression, the beginning of a career in insurance, the various mechanisms and machines which enable respiration, the death of his parents, the onset of post-polio syndrome, a successful venture into independent living, his marriage, his experiences as a stepfather, his developing religious faith, and, of course, his seven wheelchairs.

However well told, there were moments when I wanted less of this personal journey and more of the voyage toward broader societal shifts such as the Americans with Disabilities Act. Presley touches briefly on the lack of universal personal assistant programmes and concludes by saying “but that’s another story” (63). In a book brimming with stories I would have liked a little more of what you might call the socio-political context. There is only a light nod to the dramatic and comprehensive changes disabled people have forced through in the five decades since Presley began using a wheelchair. It is clear he is not unaware of these developments in disability politics (he describes himself as “Gimp” and tells of past contributions to disability magazines), and the lack of explication of how and when his disability activism began was immensely frustrating. All the more so because it signals a missed pedagogical opportunity. The book succeeds in being a powerful personal story that has much to offer students...