Running with Scissors meets The Liar's Club in this edgy and wickedly hilarious memoir about one irrepressible, mean, little, deaf queer

When Terry Galloway was born on Halloween, no one knew that an experimental antibiotic given to her mother had wreaked havoc on her fetal nervous system. After her family moved from Berlin Germany, to Austin, Texas, hers became a deafening, hallucinatory childhood where everything, including her own body, changed for the worse. But those unwelcome changes awoke in this particular child a dark, defiant humor that fueled her lifelong obsessions with language, duplicity, and performance.

As a ten-year-old self-proclaimed “child freak,” she acted out her fury at her boxy hearing aids and Coke-bottle glasses by faking her own drowning at a camp for crippled children. Ever since that first real-life performance, Galloway has used theater and performance, whether onstage or off, to defy and transcend her reality. With disarming candor, Terry writes about her mental breakdown, her queer identity, and living in a silent, quirky world populated by unforgettable characters. What could have been a bitter litany of complaint is instead an unexpectedly hilarious and affecting take on life.

“This is a damn fine piece of work which is unbelievably powerful. This story is true and passionate and fearless and funny as hell when it is not heartbreaking. I expect this book to charm the hell out of great numbers of people, piss off a few, and give hope to many more...”

—Dorothy Allison.

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Contents

• Prologue: Nine
• Part I: Drowning
• Them and Me
• Visions
• Presto Change-o
• Meaner
• The Performance of Drowning
          (Listen to it; MP3, 67 MB)
• Lost Boy
• Part II: Passing
• Little-d Deaf
• On Being Told No
• Passing Strange
• Drag Acts
• Shhhhhh!
• Jobs for the Deaf
• The Shallow End
• Part III: Emerging
• Scare
• Who Died and What Killed Them
• Why I Should Matter
• Epilogue: A Happy Life . . .
• Acknowledgments