A Nearly Normal Life: A Memoir

As a fourteen-year-old boy from a small Midwestern town, Charles Mee believed in God, family, and his future, which, at the very least, included girls and a long spell as a hometown football hero. But when he collapsed one night at a school dance, his dreams began to vanish. In a narrative at once funny and profound, Mee brilliantly captures the era in which polio, not communism, was every American parent's nightmare. Unraveling the mysteries of his own Cold War youth, Mee gives voice both to the child with a potentially fatal disease and to the man whose recognition of himself as a disabled outsider has served to heighten his gifts as a storyteller.

"And although I couldn't play football and basketball, I discovered that I could write about them with real sympathy and passion, and so, without ever meaning to, I became a writer.

I became a writer before I had any plan about it. It felt good, and so I kept doing it. I wrote about sports for Barrington's weekly newspaper, and I found I liked putting together a sentence that moved and worked as well as a jump shot. Here was something I could do with my head. And the page was, as they say, a level playing field. There I could be as good as anyone else, and maybe even better. After I had written about sports for a while, I tried short stories and poems.

Now and then I would tell my friends that I might become a writer. And sometimes someone would reply: 'What do you have to say?' I had nothing to say; it was just something I could do sitting down. It wasn't until years later I realized that writing is not about saying something, it is about discovering something."

Charles Mee is a playwright and the author of more than a dozen books. He lives in Brooklyn."