From New York Times bestselling author Kathleen Norris comes a deeply personal and insightful memoir exploring the myriad ways God works in our lives. Rebecca Sue: A Sister’s Reflection on Disability, Faith, and Love (IVP) is an intimate portrait of Rebecca, "Becky," her younger sister who was born with perinatal hypoxia. Physical and mental disabilities shaped Becky's life, and Norris observes how her spirit and resilience illuminate the hidden power of faith, family, and love.
What led you to write about your beloved sister now, after more than a decade since your last nonfiction work?
I feel as if I’ve been working on this book for much of my life. I’ve known for years I wanted to tell my sister’s story. Becky had brain damage caused by perinatal hypoxia—lack of oxygen in the birth canal—and was intelligent enough to know what had happened to her. This knowledge was a lifelong burden for her, fostering anger and resentment and that nagging question, “Why me?” But being a treasured member of our family helped her to flourish. Becky had a strong personality and a memorable way with words. I’ve often felt that she was meant to be the writer in the family. It took me a long time to figure out how to write about her, and this book feels like a miracle to me.
What did Becky teach you about living well?
She taught me persistence and the wisdom of knowing that if the approved method of doing things doesn’t work for you, you can find one that does. My mother taught kindergarten and recognized early on that Becky was slow to develop basic skills. Learning to crawl, for example, required physical and mental coordination she lacked. Even my brother and I getting down on the floor to show her how it was done didn’t help. But Becky adapted: instead of crawling, she developed a method of scooting around the house like a little rocket.
What do you hope readers find in themselves by reading this book?
I hope that readers will encounter my sister as a full person who refused to let her disabilities define her. It strikes me that my sister’s transformation from a self-absorbed person to one who genuinely cared about others is, in a sense, the normal transition we all make from adolescence to adulthood. For my sister, narcissism was a good defense mechanism, a useful and maybe even necessary protection that served her well for years. When she finally began to shed it and take more interest in other people, it was a revelation.
But Becky wore her narcissism so transparently that it was easy to forgive her. When I once tried to tell her about something good that had recently happened to me, she interrupted me with an emphatic, “No! I go first! My story is more important than yours!” I hope readers will be able to laugh at themselves as they hear Becky say out loud what many feel but prefer to keep hidden.
How does Becky’s transformation in her later years mirror our own transformations brought out by maturity, spiritual awareness, or life events?
I was in my teens when I realized that while Becky did mature, she did so much more slowly than most people. She was nearing 40 years of age when her adolescent fixation on “cute boys” began to wane. For years, my sister was the perfect target for marketers, believing that using the right shampoo or perfume would attract a man or allow her to belong to one of the happy groups of young people depicted in advertisements. When that didn’t happen, it increased her sense of loneliness.
Becky’s transformation into adulthood came in the last years of her life, and it was stunning. Her strong desire to have people like her had caused her much trouble over the years. But she had finally realized that for people to like her, all she had to do was to be herself. That’s a lesson many people never learn.
What do you hope this book does for the disability community—those who advocate for that community and those who ignore it, those who are part of it themselves or are caregivers?
Writing this book made me realize how important it was that Becky always had the security of a loving family. We knew her, we accepted her with all her faults, but we also challenged her when she misbehaved.
People so readily discount and dismiss the disabled. In her last years, when Becky was in a wheelchair and I was her designated driver, I came to develop what I call “the wheelchair test.” Whenever we encountered a new physician or nurse and they had a question for Becky, they would often address it to me. I’d tell them that Becky could answer for herself.
What do you want readers to know about Becky and, in turn, your family’s journey with Becky?
This book is about an ordinary family that was called to love an extraordinary person who landed in our midst. My dad summed it up well when he said about my sister, “We learn a lot about love from her.” Familial love can endure through all kinds of hardship and can forgive what seems unforgivable. As a young adult, Becky was part of a three-generation household, including three nieces and a nephew. Becky was proud to be their aunt, and the children, growing up in her presence, appreciated this nominal adult who was childlike enough to play games with them for hours. I’m proud of the way they came to understand and honor Becky’s deep need for love and attention.
What emotions did this dredge up for you?
The first vignette I wrote seemed like a minor one, an account of taking my sister to a Beach Boys concert in the early 1960s, when she was 11. I was surprised when writing it caused me to break down and sob, gasping for breath. This told me that I had embarked on a deeply emotional journey, and I wondered, “What am I getting myself into?” Strong emotions continued to surface as I read Becky’s journals and her correspondence with our parents.
Why do you think it’s important to savor our memories of loved ones who are now gone?
I believe that we carry our beloved dead with us throughout our lives, and I regard writing about them as a great privilege. While I can’t bring them back to life, I can tell stories about them in a way that makes them real for the reader.
How can we best speak for those who perhaps can’t speak for themselves, whether it’s spiritually, relationally, physically, or politically?
I’m reluctant to think that I can speak for anyone but myself, and in all of my memoirs I’ve tried to allow other people to speak for themselves. In Rebecca Sue, I often quote from my sister’s letters and use her own words from our conversations. To give the reader a good sense of who my sister was, I open the book with the remarkable list of questions that she sent to my parents when she was a teenager. It includes everything from “Will I always be slow?” “Why did it happen?” and “What will happen to me if you get sick?” to the confession, “I’m cheating on my math.”
I think the most important thing anyone can do for another person, disabled or not, is to listen to them and discover who they are. With the disabled in particular, we shortchange ourselves and disrespect them if we refuse to see that they are much more than their disability.
If you could say one thing to Rebecca Sue now, what would it be?
Becky was incapable of hiding her jealousy of me when my first book, Dakota, became a bestseller. The letter she wrote to me about it, printed in its entirety in Rebecca Sue, is a typical Becky mix of stream-of-consciousness, expressing pride in me but also anguish. I was relieved when Becky found a way around her conflicting emotions. One day she declared, “You should write a book about me, so I can be famous like you.”
I took that as a call, in the religious sense of the word. And while it took me more than 10 years to finish this book, now I can say to my sister: “See, Becky, I did it!”
