The Backwards Hand: A Memoir

Ligeia magazine editor Lee (Crisis Actor) intertwines memories of his health struggles with historical representations of disabled people as monstrous in this raw, discomfiting memoir. Lee was born with a rare congenital defect that prohibits him from turning his palms face up. Here, he hops—with sometimes-jarring abruptness—from anecdotes about his own disability to musings on cinematic monsters, to sections detailing atrocities committed by and against other disabled people. In one typically dizzying sequence, Lee recounts a Philadelphia woman’s scheme to prey on mentally disabled people for their Social Security benefits, then jumps to his own college womanizing, then cuts to a brutal account of a real-life Japanese man with deformed hands who sexually tortured and killed children. Elsewhere, Lee details the Nazis’ fascination with dwarves, considers Frida Kahlo’s physical afflictions, and lists the women he’s wronged with repeated infidelity, which he ties both to his lifelong rage and his father’s own transgressions. In the final pages, as he approaches fatherhood, Lee arrives at the book’s major takeaway: “Deformity does not define the monster. His actions do.” While it’s unclear how the disjointed narrative brought Lee to that conclusion, readers may recall the words of Lee’s writing professor after the author submits a gruesome short story: “Literature should be challenging.” On those grounds, this one-of-a-kind autobiography succeeds. (May)