Interview with Heidi Heilig about The Girl from Everywhere
Heidi Heilig and S. Jae-Jones sit down to talk about the book’s portrayal of bipolar disorder, writing mental illness, and writing with a mental illness.
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The Trope of Faking It
The notion of people faking disabilities is not at all new or novel–and, like many, many disability tropes, it’s a harmful one.
The Trope of Curing Disability
For disabled characters, being cured is a common trope. What’s more, in most of these narratives, the characters are cured because they’re better than they were at the start of the book: kinder, gentler, braver. And finally, finally, they’re normal and whole.
Being a Poster Child
A poster child, to me, is a child with a disability who is “shown off” as a way to generate funds, awareness, understanding, more funds. Mostly funds, in my experience.
What You See … And What You Don’t See
What you won’t be able to see when you first meet me is this: I’m a published author. I read all the time. I write all the time, too. I dictate, using an old-fashioned cassette recorder, and my mother types up my finished drafts.
Why Pelvic Pain Is Absent from YA Fiction
An estimated 1 in 7 women suffer from chronic pelvic pain; it’s bizarre and disappointing that despite these statistics, there are distinctly zero characters with this condition.
Disability, Individuality, and Differences of Opinion
A mistake I see a lot of writers who write about disability make is asking only one person for help. I’ve heard so many people say things like, “I have a cousin who is blind, and she read the book and said it was good at portraying blindness.”
Separating Writer from Character
When I received my diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome seven years ago, I thought of all the young people today who face the social challenges and bullying that I faced decades earlier. I wanted to create a character like me, but one who fights back against the way others treat her in a way that I never did.
But Sometimes, It Does Suck
Blind characters seem to always go too far in either one direction or the other—either completely ruled by their disability, or completely unfazed. The truth is, I hate both, because neither is honest.
Normalcy vs. Needs
Here’s the thing no one tells you about people with a medical condition: The disease is always on their mind, but they don’t always want to think about it.