In The Ugly Cry, Danielle Henderson writes about experiencing abuse from family members, being abandoned by her mother and growing up with her foulmouthed, horror movie-loving grandmother. Individually these topics seem unfathomably heavy—but Henderson leavens them with humor to create a wholly original testament to survival.

Why did you choose the title The Ugly Cry?
It’s something my grandmother said whenever a child was crying in her presence. “Oooo, you look ugly when you cry.” Then she would laugh, and her laugh would make me stop crying and laugh, too. I realized as an adult that she never actually cared if it made us stop crying, and she wasn’t saying it as a kindness. She genuinely loves teasing children, because she is a tiny maniac.

You use your power of observation to deliver vivid portraits of your family members in this book. Did you rely on diaries or journals for this? Do you still keep a journal?
I never felt safe keeping a journal when I was a child. My abuser would have used it to embarrass me, and later I shared space (including my bedroom) in my grandparents’ house to such an extensive degree that the concept of privacy was tantamount to winning the lottery—impossibly out of my grasp. I always wrote in great detail when I was in school, but I didn’t start journaling in earnest until I was 18 years old.

I journal every day now and have for years, but I think the reason I was able to deliver such vivid portraits of my family is that I’ve observed them for over 40 years. I narrowed in on my most vivid memories and used my knowledge of how my family acts and reacts to fill in the story. I realized in therapy that hyperobservation was a response to my trauma, a way of keeping myself safe. I learned at a very early age that I could not stop trauma from happening, but I could gain some sense of control if I was prepared for it—which doesn’t work either, as it turns out. But that’s what turned on the switch.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of The Ugly Cry.

What’s the appeal for you of writing memoir instead of fiction?
Memoir creates deeper connections, whether you’re writing a book or telling a story over dinner. I thought about the books I needed to see on my library list when I was a teenager, and I would have felt so much better about myself if I knew that other women had survived similar families. I’m compelled to tell my story as it happened because I am compelled by connection as a form of healing.

Since finishing The Ugly Cry, have you received any reactions from the family members you write about in your book?
My brother is the only person in my family I’ve allowed to read the book, and his reaction was unexpected, because he apologized. At first I couldn’t understand why, but he felt terrible for not being there for me more when we were younger. I reminded him that we were both children, both reeling from trauma in different ways, and the important thing is that we reached a place in our 20s where we became very close again. But he felt a lot of grief when he was finished reading and considered that there were a lot of things about our childhood that he’s never addressed. He may go to therapy. The fact that my book could even make him consider it is a triumph. 

My great-aunt (my grandmother’s sister) has also read the book and is incredibly supportive. She loved seeing her little sister come to life on the page, and we both laughed about stories from my childhood. But she also had some grief—even though she was aware of what happened to me, she did not know the details. It hurts to put someone in a place years later where they feel guilt about something they could not control, but the beauty that comes from the connection of it alleviates that pain. 

My mother knows about the book, but I haven’t sent her a copy yet. She will definitely read it, but our relationship is in such a tender place as we try to reconnect that I kind of don’t want her voice in my head. As present as she is in this book, this is not her story to tell.

“I thought about the books I needed when I was a teenager, and I would have felt so much better about myself if I knew that other women had survived similar families.”

You originally set out to become a fashion designer but became a writer instead. What changed your course?
Oh, my résumé reads like I’ve been on the run from the law. Most of the work I’ve done has been out of survival—I’ve supported myself entirely since I first left home after high school—and that does not leave a lot of room to dream or define your goals. I didn’t become a fashion designer because I left school, and in 1996 I could see no other way to reach that goal. I worked in coffee shops, bookstores and restaurants, having two or three jobs at the same time, because I had to pay rent and eventually size up from a futon mattress on the floor to an actual bed.

The thing about my writing career is that it was never supposed to happen. I never set out to follow that dream; my writing was always just for me. My course changed as I changed, as I grew, as I gained more confidence in my abilities or felt more desperation about how I was living. Going back to college at 30 years old was very freeing; I was being valued for my brain by people who encouraged me to take bigger chances.

When I left my Ph.D. program, I started freelance writing full time. The first time I was able to pay my rent and bills with a paycheck earned from writing was my tipping point. My agent found me through my freelance writing, which jump-started a writing career in television that I was also never supposed to have. My literary agent was a friend of a friend; when he heard my stories over dinner, he said, “You should write a book.”

There are plenty of writers who know what they want to do in utero and map their lives toward those specific goals. I’ve never taken a writing course, I’ve never been to a writer’s retreat, I’ve never taken a year off to work on my craft. I survived, and I keep surviving. Then I write it down.

“I’m compelled to tell my story as it happened because I am compelled by connection as a form of healing.”

The tenacity and grit you demonstrate throughout your memoir is impressive. What, or who, helped you persevere the most?
This is the most difficult question to answer, because I truly do not know. There’s no way I should have survived what I did, and as early as I did. If you look at my beginnings, that’s not a kid who eventually moves to Alaska for four years on a whim. This may be an unfulfilling answer, but I persevered because I had no choice. I did not have the option of moving back home once I was gone. My family was never going to support me financially. I didn’t have a therapist until I was in my 20s. There was no scaffolding, nothing propping me up. If my life was going to be worth living, I had to figure that out on my own.

In The Ugly Cry, you acknowledge the racism embedded in your community, but you seem to consider it more a fact of life than an obstacle. Has your perception of that racism changed as you’ve gotten older?
Absolutely not. Racism is still a fact of my life every day. Racism didn’t get worse; it got louder. It got confident. But so did I.

Your honest voice shines through in this book, especially when treading softly around the abuse you experienced. Through your craft, you let these dark times speak for themselves while keeping the focus on your own behavior and reactions. What was it like to write about these heavier topics? Did you rely on any forms of support or comfort to soften the emotional blow?
My therapist deserves her own chapter at the end of this book! She was crucial to helping me get out of my own way and find value in my voice. For a long time, I didn’t feel like my life story was worth telling; bad things happen to everyone, and some experience far worse things than I have. My therapist helped me to remove that layer of comparison and learn how to write without focusing on the audience. 

It wasn’t difficult to write about my abuse. That may seem strange, but I’ve been telling my story for years and am very adept at flopping out those facts. Perhaps that’s why you feel the darker times speak for themselves; I just told what happened without giving any thought to spicing it up with glitz or glamour. In those scenes I was more of a reporter. The events were enough. 

“Racism didn’t get worse; it got louder. It got confident. But so did I.”

Flannery O’Connor said, “The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” What would you say to that?
I understand the sentiment, but I don’t think that’s entirely true—especially now, when hypervigilant parents are shielding children from their own childhoods as a way to avoid any kind of pain. A lot of people emerge from childhood as absolute chumps, and they remain chumps until their dying day. This is a statement made from a place of privilege. 

I would say the opposite was true of my experience. Yes, I had a clear picture of the horrors the world could throw at you, but it took me decades to learn that I was worthy of love. It took me even longer to learn that I could love someone else. For me, surviving childhood meant that I started my adult life at a deficit. 

Your acknowledgements are extensive and heartfelt, and they include your mother. Are you at peace with her?
I’m at peace with myself. I was able to find an astonishing amount of grace as I was writing about her, which came as a surprise. We reconnected last year when my aunt was dying; I flew my mom, brother and sister out to say goodbye. But our relationship is still in flux. I’ve made peace with her in that I see her for exactly who she is, and I’m no longer willing to spend effort on being angry at all the things she’s not. That does not mean there is a happily ever after for us, but it does mean that there is a happily ever after for me.

“I don’t think grandparents get enough credit for the myriad ways they save our lives.”

The people in your memoir are so memorable. Can you see your story as a movie? Any thoughts about who would play your grandmother?
I actually optioned the book as a TV show years ago, when it was just a proposal. It landed in a place that wanted to emphasize the sitcom elements, which ignored so much of the reality of my life that in the end it didn’t work out. I’m trying to enjoy the book as it is, existing in the precise way I wanted people to receive this information about me, before I entertain it as a film. And truly, I may be avoiding it because absolutely no one could play my grandmother. 

Who would you like to see read your book?
Everyone. I will not rest until I am casually sitting next to someone on public transit and they are reading my book, gently crying tears of blood. 

Everyone, but especially grandparents and people raised by grandparents. There are so many of us, and those relationships are so special. I don’t think grandparents get enough credit for the myriad ways they save our lives.

What do you hope readers will take away from The Ugly Cry?
The great capacity we all have to survive. The boulders of joy we can find among the pebbles of pain. I want readers to feel that their families are an origin story, not an endpoint.

Author photo credit © Maile Knight

James Tate Hill is a man of many talents and multiple jobs: He teaches writing online and at North Carolina A&T State University, pens the audiobooks column for Literary Hub and is the fiction and reviews editor for the literary journal Monkeybicycle. In 2015 he became a novelist with the publication of Academy Gothic. And now he’s a memoirist, too, with his new book, Blind Man’s Bluff.

That’s an impressive list of accomplishments—especially since, for nearly 15 years, Hill had an additional exhausting, around-the-clock job: concealing from everyone around him, through a series of strategic misdirections, lies of omission and daring feats of method acting, that he is legally blind.

Thankfully, that era of his life has come to a close, and in Blind Man’s Bluff, Hill is upbeat and candid as he speaks his truth about the years when he was, as he writes, “always relieved people thought I was an asshole and not blind” when he didn’t respond to inquiring glances or friendly waves.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Blind Man’s Bluff.

This is an unusual approach to human relationships, the author acknowledges in a call to the Greensboro, North Carolina, home where he lives with his wife. But Hill’s initial fear of stigma and judgment was so all-consuming that engaging in extraordinary efforts to hide what he saw as a terrible flaw seemed entirely reasonable—so much so that it developed into a full-fledged secret life.

Hill’s dedication to obfuscation began at age 16 when he learned he had Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy, a condition that causes loss of vision over time as the cells in the optic nerve die. From then on, he would feign eye contact during conversations. At restaurants, he would ask the server for recommendations rather than attempting to read a menu. When he began teaching college classes, he’d tell students to speak without raising their hands.

But what made secret-keeping seem like the right response? “It was definitely the social element, when I realized OK, I’m different, and I don’t like the ways I’m different,” Hill says. He longed for a solution to the anger he felt at his diagnosis and the uncertainty that lay ahead, and he viewed “stoicism as a victory, as an answer.” He thought skipping over his grief would be a sort of solution, without “knowing for a very long time that there was anything problematic with that.”

“Your relationships deepen exponentially when you’re no longer hiding parts of yourself.”

Now in his mid-40s, Hill sees his blindness as a feature rather than a bug and credits his writerly career with helping him take big emotional leaps toward self-acceptance. “Academy Gothic was the first time I was writing in any sort of autobiographical physicality, with the main character having the same impairment that I do,” he says. “It’s not an emotional book. It’s sort of a Raymond Chandler-esque satirical academic mystery.” But it was the personal essays Hill wrote as part of the publicity campaign for Academy Gothic that began drawing attention.

In 2016, Hill’s Literary Hub essay “On Being a Writer Who Can’t Read” got a response “so much more intense than anything else I had written or published,” he says. “It was almost as though I had tapped into an even more honest, more compelling voice than the one I had fabricated for the novel . . . and I slowly realized it was very rewarding to tap into that voice.”

In Blind Man’s Bluff, Hill’s voice ranges from moving to funny to self-loathing to contemplative as he reveals his darkest thoughts and most difficult days alongside precious moments of triumph and joy. He periodically employs the second person—“as a way of acknowledging that my own experience is not exclusive to me,” he says—to excellent effect, especially when homing in on the persistent isolation he felt at home, at school and in his own head.

“I acknowledge as blind. I identify as disabled. It may be trite to say this, but: It’s very liberating.”

Hill also includes well-crafted, hair-raising passages about the risks he took to avoid asking for help as his vision worsened, such as crossing a busy street solo. “Each zooming vehicle is your natural predator deciding capriciously not to eat you,” he writes. There’s also the lower-stakes but still exquisitely nerve-fraying “Grand Guignol of canapes, a chip that must be sent on a recon mission into a dip of unknown depth or viscosity.” And there are hilarious and insightful scenes about online dating, as the author navigates various prospective romantic pairings gone wrong. After all, he remarks, “the more times you present yourself to strangers, the more epiphanies about yourself you’re going to have.”

So far one major transformation has occurred every 14 to 15 years in Hill’s life—losing his vision, telling the truth about his disability and publishing a book about accepting it—and I ask whether this pattern offers a clue about future endeavors. Hill ponders this and declares with a laugh, “Look out, late 50s—I’ll be storming the world!”

Until then, Hill says he’s channeling his new self-awareness, self-acceptance and energy into writing “a weird speculative novel set in the malls of the 1980s and ’90s featuring child stars, some real and some fictional,” as well as into promotional events for Blind Man’s Bluff. He hopes his readers will come away with the realization that “accepting yourself for who you are is a choice. . . . I think your relationships deepen exponentially when you’re no longer hiding parts of yourself.”

As for himself, Hill says, “I acknowledge as blind. I identify as disabled. It may be trite to say this, but: It’s very liberating.”

Author photo credit © Lori Jackson Hill

“The great work of our lives is [figuring out] how to tell the story of our lives,” says Sarah Ruhl, speaking by phone from Chicago. Ruhl, a MacArthur Fellow and two-time Pulitzer finalist for drama, knows about stories. Her eye for detail is on full display in her memoir, Smile: The Story of a Face, which explores Ruhl’s experience with Bell’s palsy, a rare condition in which a part of the face becomes paralyzed. “The process of writing the book was cathartic,” Ruhl says, because for the first few years of her paralysis, “I wasn’t able to talk about my face. It was shoved deep under. But astonishingly, it was right on the surface.”

Quick, illuminating turns of phrase like that—shoved under but right on the surface—abound in Smile, which examines the paradoxes of illness, especially as experienced by women. The book historicizes the topic, recalling, for instance, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the short story that Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote after enduring bed rest as a medical treatment. The same doctor who prescribed this remedy for Gilman offered a different prescription for men: adventures on the Western frontier. “The 19th-century response is not as far away as we think,” says Ruhl, who was prescribed bed rest herself during her pregnancy, even though the treatment has had mixed results historically.

“I wasn’t able to talk about my face. It was shoved deep under. But astonishingly, it was right on the surface.”

Ruhl spent her time in bed reading the letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, thinking idly that they would make a good play (which she later wrote). She also dove unapologetically into the Twilight series. “We can’t predict how our minds will behave in extremis or when we are ill,” Ruhl says, remembering that when her father was sick with cancer, he read books about sea voyages. “Often you need something deeply plot-driven just to get through the stasis. You’re not able to look at the thing directly when you’re really scared about how your body is betraying you.” The epigraph in Smile, taken from Virginia Woolf, reiterates this point: “when the lights of health go down, undiscovered countries are then disclosed.”

Ruhl’s experience with Bell’s palsy began the morning after she gave birth to twins. A nurse entered her room and said, “Your eye looks droopy.” When Ruhl looked in the mirror, she writes, “I tried to move my face. Impossible. Puppet face, strings cut.” Bell’s palsy is typically a temporary facial paralysis that clears up completely in a matter of days or weeks—as opposed to Ruhl’s experience, which has lasted for over a decade, though the paralysis has lessened over time. Initially it impacted everything from chewing food to pronouncing words to conveying emotion. Writing about it required self-examination as she searched for ways to frame her experience. These framing lenses, which she calls “thinking lenses,” helped her “really feel what I was feeling about my face.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Smile.

For example, Ruhl drew strength from public figures who’ve had facial paralysis, including the poet Allen Ginsburg. The book features a photograph of Ginsburg staring into the camera, forcing viewers to engage what Ruhl describes as “the disturbance” of his asymmetry. She also turned to art history, looking at Mona Lisa’s famous half-smile, a mismatched expression that captured the world’s interest. And, because of her connection to the theater, she examined theories about the link between facial expressions and emotion. “Thank God I am not an actor,” she says. “To have that instrument taken away as an actor would be so demoralizing.”

As Ruhl wrote about her face, she found she had a surprising amount to say—about women caught in ambiguous medical problems, about the face as the part of the body where the soul resides (or not) and about the difficulties of mothering young children while pursuing passionate, consuming work. Often these stories overlap, as in one memorable instance when she chose to breastfeed her child while on a stage in front of 300 people. Gloria Steinem was speaking when the baby began to fuss. Mary Rodgers, who wrote Freaky Friday, was seated next to Ruhl, and as Ruhl began to nurse her infant, Rodgers patted Ruhl’s leg and said, “That’s right, that’s right.” Ruhl excels at exploring connections like these, both near and distant, that help pull us through trouble.

“Sometimes teaching is no more than saying, ‘You can be a writer. Welcome to this secret society.’”

For Ruhl, this includes her connection with her husband, Tony. “My editor always wanted more scenes with Tony,” she laughs. And, indeed, when I talk about Smile with my friends, it’s a story about Tony that comes to mind: how Ruhl coined the phrase “sexy-cozy” to describe her feeling when he cared for her. “Sexy-cozy,” she writes in the book, “is the opposite of dirty-sexy.” Clearly this is a word that should be in wider circulation, one that would probably resonate with many happily married women, which is how Ruhl gratefully regards herself. “There’s something about the narrative of a happy marriage that we don’t see that much,” she says.

Ruhl also credits her teacher, Pulitzer-winning playwright Paula Vogel, for her support. “I wouldn’t be writing plays without Paula,” she says. “I think that Paula tapping me on the head and saying, ‘You can do this,’ was profoundly important. Sometimes teaching is no more than saying, ‘You can be a writer. Welcome to this secret society.’”

Though Ruhl’s journey with Bell’s palsy is not entirely resolved—she says that she is still thinking through how to live in her body, such as deciding whether she is willing to smile at people with her teeth—this warm-hearted, brave and funny memoir is her way of tapping readers on the head, encouraging us. You can keep going. You are part of the club. You are not alone.

Author photo credit: Gregory Costanzo