I had heard only good things about this collection so I was pretty excited for it, but from the beginning, I had a bad feeling. There's an uncomfortable combination of internalized ableism and isolation/alienation from larger disability community and politics, where I felt very on edge as a reader who identifies as disabled and Mad.

The first big, definable red flag was an essay that makes excuses for why a mother and sister brutally killed their schizophrenic son/brother, with an emphasis on their fatigue and not the inherent worth of their son/brother even if he never "recovered," and with no larger history or analysis of disability-related filicide (which, check out this link to Disability Day of Mourning information if you've never heard of this before, CW for death, grief, and ableism: https://disability-memorial.org/).

But I finally decided to DNF after "The Choice of Children," which features a heavy and uninspected emphasis on functional labels (which have so many issues), unnecessary and repeated use of the R slur, and an uncomfortable argument on why she doesn't want to have children to potentially pass genetic disability onto (which, it feels like eugenics should be discussed here, somehow? Like the history and current landscape of eugenics absolutely affects why some disabled people, especially those alienated from community and politics, don't want to birth potentially disabled children. And that doesn't automatically mean you should have children, that there aren't also valid reasons to not want to birth or raise children, but like... you cannot discuss this phenomenon independently of eugenics and if you're acting like you are it's probably just uncritically replicating neoeugenic logic).