Characters with Disabilities as Part of the Narrative

Think about it. How many people in your life live with mental illness (depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia) physical impairments, hearing impairments, vision impairments...

I'll bet you don't live a life peopled with only able bodied individuals, and yet, that's the ableist narrative, the cultural story, the stigma people with disabilities face.

I've set out to write mystery and suspense novels that include characters with disabilities who are part of the narrative. In other words, the disabilities are not the main point of the plot, the characters are not evil because of how they appear, and they are not heroes simply because they are alive. Oh yes, and they don't get cured so we can all feel like this is a perfect world with no problems.

Narrative fiction is flooded with able bodied people and stereotypical characters with disabilities.

I am recovering from depression and addiction, and I live a very full life. I worked, I raised a family, a have relationships with partners and friends. I did experience functional limitations to my life at various times, but because my disability was hidden, most people never noticed. So, in a way, I passed as non disabled. But that didn't work until I acknowledged to myself that I was experiencing a functional limitation, and I needed to accept that and not try to pass in my own brain.

I actually remember the place where it happened and how shocked I was to understand it. I didn't accept my own limitations.

I wanted to change fiction -- no literary fiction but popular fiction, romance and mystery fiction, to include characters with disabilities.

No Way Out, my soon to be released suspense novel features Molly Donovan, a hard-charging fraud investigator and her new romantic interest PI Miguel Alvarez. Molly lost the use of her left arm in a rare stroke suffered in high school. She uses brains, brawn and her unaffected arm to . Miguel is a recovering addict, who navigates a maze of old friends and old habits. The two make a connection. A peripheral characters fight the notion that his disability makes him evil.

And Cotton Lee Penn, in the southern mysteries Gone on Sunday and Premonition, fights the same cultural attitudes in the 1970s -- along with the idea that disabled people shouldn't have sex.

Let's change the habit of eliminating half our friends and lovers from our fiction.

Thanks remain as always: mysterious in New Mexico...