Last week, I read a
m/m romance. In this book, a hair stylist falls for one of his customers, a wheelchair user
in his first relationship since his accident ten years ago. I love stories like
this. I not only read them, but I write them. A few of the books in my New
Beginnings series have disabled characters so I’m always excited to read about
them.
Only a few chapters into the book I was reading, I found
myself rolling my eyes, but I kept going. The premise was strong and the potential
to be great was there so I didn’t want to give up. The more I read the book,
the less I liked it. Finishing the book became about seeing my investment of
time through to the end as opposed to not being able to put it down.
So what was the problem?
The biggest issue for me was that everywhere this couple
went, the wheelchair user was met with a form of discrimination. I am not
kidding when I say every time they went out in public, some asshole was
insulting or attacking the wheelchair user. And every time it happened,
his able bodied boyfriend was there to save the day with a sharp word or threat
to anyone who wronged his man. Let me tell you, it got grating. Instead of this
book exploring the relationship between these two, it was more about the able
bodied guy having to fight for his disabled boyfriend.
Guess what? I wasn’t the only one who found this
off-putting. Another reviewer gave the book the same rating I was going to, and
her review was so lengthy, there was no way I couldn’t read it. In reading this
review, I learned something about my own writing of disabled characters that I
hadn’t even realized I was doing.
Like me, this reviewer was disgusted by the number of times
the able bodied man has to swoop in and save the day for his disabled
boyfriend, but our reasons were different. I felt like it happened far too
often to be realistic. The other reviewer pointed out how ableist it was. Our
able bodied character is determined to stand by his man, which is fine, but
he’s always the first to speak up when the discrimination occurs. He doesn’t
ask if his man needs or wants the help. He just jumps up to defend his man and
then magnanimously points out that the discrimination isn’t happening on his
watch. Not being disabled, I hadn’t considered this, but it makes sense that it
would be annoying to assume someone wants or needs that type of defense.
I’ve written books with amputees and one with a wheelchair
user. I’m currently working on one with a blind character. Reading that review
made me wonder if I was guilty of what this writer had done. Going back through
my current work in progress, I was dismayed to find two scenes exactly like
this reviewer described. I did the insensitive waiter and the ignorant
department store clerk shtick. In both scenes, my sighted character takes it
upon herself to speak up before the blind man even has a chance to react.
As the reviewer of the other book pointed out, this isn’t
intentional. When you’re not disabled, you don’t always have the right
perspective to understand how insensitive and annoying that can be; how it has
the opposite effect of what you were going for.
Thanks to a bad review on someone else’s book, I learned a
few things to make me a better writer, including strategies to avoid being
unintentionally ablest. One woman’s bad review turned out to be a treasure for
me.
