Special People

Remember the book The Maid? In that book, Nita Prose introduces us to Molly Gray, a young woman who loves to clean but doesn’t have typical social skills. The term ‘neurodivergent’ seems to cover an array of symptoms that she has. In other words, Molly’s brain simply works differently from that of the majority of folks. So how does one deal with a person like Molly. How do we deal with people who are different from us? These next two books explore that theme with two other ‘differences’–memory loss and mood swings.

In The Emporer of Gladness, Ocean Vuong introduces us to a young Vietnamese American boy named Hai. His life circumstances lead him to the edge of a bridge. He intends to jump. It is here in the story that Grazina, an elderly Lithuanian woman with dementia, enters Hai’s life. Needless to say, he does not jump but rather goes to live with and take care of Grazina. There are other themes in the story–namely the timely theme about the value of hourly wage work. The Guardian reviewer says the book is “heartbreaking, heartwarming yet unsentimental, and savagely comic, all at the same time……..”

More or Less Maddie, by Lisa Genova, is a carefully researched story told with sensitivity and humor. Genova’s main character Maddy is a freshman in college experiencing adjustment problems. Now, wouldn’t this scenario be typical? Except that it is not. Our heroine is eventually diagnosed with bipolar disease, something she does not readily accept. What further complicates Maddy’s life is that she decides to become a stand-up comedienne. Genova also wrote Still Alice, which is testament enough to the fact that she knows what she’s talking about when she writes about diseases. While some critics reduce the book to being a candidate for an after-school special, fans of Genova will argue that it gives important insights into how to deal with a bipolar prognosis, be it for that of a loved one or even for yourself.

Lisa Genova