First Journal Entry for A Nearly Normal Life

by Charles L. Mee

A Nearly Normal Life by Charles L. Mee is a true story, a biography if one wishes to call it such, of a boy (the author, written in first person) who comes down with polio, and how the virus changed his life forever. That there is rather lame, summary of the story, witch of course really doesn’t get the books point across at all. To do the book hopefully more justice, I think I shall now recount how I picked the book up, and my first impressions of it etc...

The book is brand new, and the only reason I picked/bought it was because I simply didn’t see anything else I wanted to read when I was at Borders and my Grandmother handed it to me. So, in short, I got stuck with it. I really didn’t think it would fit the categories too well, especially the minorities in America theme. It sounded far too familiar, and I thought I might end up reading another A Separate Peace. While not really a bad book, certainly is not the kind of book I want to read twice.

So I started reading, and the first thing that I noticed was that the narrator in this book actually sounds like a real person. The Language, while not overly simple, is not embellished in any way whatsoever, and the opinion of the author can be related to by a "normal" person such as myself. Also luckily, neither does the author wail unendingly about how horrible having polio was etc. rather there is a good mix of all the human emotions. More importantly, I found it relates almost perfectly to both the themes our book was supposed to have. For the "coming of age" theme, naturally it fit this, as what else would a book about a person who had polio and survived be about? And as for the "minorities in America" it also fits very well, if perhaps not in the way intended. The author is not in a racial, or religious minority in any way whatsoever. However he is a minority. As he points out many times himself, he was a cripple, an outcast from society. Polio was an "embarrassing" disease and most people would try to hide it any way possible. So he was literally a minority, and really, faced the same problems as a religious or racial minority. He wasn’t the same, he didn’t fit in, occasionally he would be discriminated against, and society as a whole viewed him as weird, an outcast. He would have to go through pains nobody else would, do things nobody else had to do. So really perhaps the book fit this theme best of all, even if not in the same exact way as Asher Lev.

Speaking of that book, come to think of it A Nearly Normal Life has other similarities too. Like Asher, being a minority, Charles (the narrator/boy) finds himself through art, although not the same type of art. He finds he can express himself through reading and writing, something he took no interest in , something he even disliked before he came down with polio. Also like Asher, his parents, in particular his father don’t approve of his talents 100 percent. The book bears some other minor similarities, but they are not, in my opinion, really worth writing down.

Rather, I’d instead like to talk about things that I liked/noticed about this piece of literature. First off I like the "format" for lack of a better word. The way the book is written very much resembles and reflects the way the author sees the world, and the author himself. The book loosely following the narrator growing up often jumps off topic, sometimes for an entire chapter, with no explanation of the jump, or sometimes, even what the heck he is talking about (although a reader can easily enough figure it out) The author describes what I’m trying to say best when he says "If a writers work constitutes a body of work then my body of work, to feel true to me, must feel fragmented. And then, too, if you find it hard to walk down the sidewalk, you like, in the freedom of your mind, to make a sentence that leaps and dances now and then before it comes to a sudden stop."