A book's residency should leave a record.

diana_doconnor

Welcome to our August discussion of Into the Deep End by Leesa Freeman.

Before we get into Luke's story, I want to start somewhere slightly outside the plot itself. Most of us have an idea of who we are going to become. We may not say it out loud, and we may not even realize how much of our identity is built around it, but we carry some version of a future in our heads. We imagine the career we'll have, the relationships we'll build, the person we'll become, the things our body will allow us to do, the places we'll go, and the people we'll still have beside us years from now.

Then sometimes life changes the plan without asking permission. And when that happens, the loss isn't always just the thing that happened. Sometimes we lose the version of ourselves that existed inside that future. That is where I think Into the Deep End becomes much bigger than Luke's spinal cord injury.

Luke is dealing with a very specific and devastating reality. He has lost physical abilities, his swimming identity, his independence, and his twin sister Bethy, while also trying to understand what his body, his relationships, his sexuality, and his future now mean.

But the question underneath all of that feels much more universal. What happens to our sense of self when the future we built our identity around is suddenly no longer possible? And I think Leesa gave us an interesting way into that question when she said that inside the specific is the universal.

Luke's circumstances belong to him. But the experience of losing something that once made us certain about who we were does not belong only to Luke. That is what I want to sit with during this discussion.

I also want us to resist the temptation to treat Luke as a lesson about disability. He is not a lesson. He is a person. He is angry, grieving, sexual, stubborn, funny, wounded, sometimes unfair, sometimes vulnerable, and sometimes deeply resistant to the people trying to help him. His disability affects every part of his life, but it does not become his entire identity.

And I think that becomes especially important when we get to the question of sexuality. Leesa has explained that she deliberately researched sexuality after spinal cord injury because she did not want Luke's physical injury to erase that part of his humanity. One reader has already responded very differently to that choice, feeling that the book focused too much on sex after reading it while trying to understand her own son's experience with paraplegia.

I don't want us to decide too quickly which reader is right. I actually think the disagreement is worth sitting with.