Slow Dance

Bonnie Sherr Klein

Knopf

Slow Dance (Knopf) by Bonnie Sherr Klein also kept me from sleep­ing, mostly because I couldn’t put it down. When I saw Klein’s photo on the cover I real­ized I’d seen her around at lit­er­ary events and I was inter­ested in this tall, self-confident woman who seemed to know every­one. At forty-six, Klein had two strokes; the sec­ond one nearly killed her. Ten years later she uses two canes to walk and a scooter named Gladys to run. This book is the story of her strokes and her reha­bil­i­ta­tion — the story of an ordi­nary per­son fac­ing her own prej­u­dices as she redis­cov­ers her place in the world, this time as a dis­abled per­son. Persimmon Blackbridge, who didn’t know Klein before her stroke, col­lab­o­rated on the book, which prob­a­bly accounts for the bal­anced pic­ture we get. Klein’s writ­ten rec­ol­lec­tions are bro­ken up with excerpts from her jour­nal, com­ments from her friends and rel­a­tives, and quo­ta­tions from her med­ical charts. In ital­i­cized sec­tions, Klein looks back on some of her early beliefs and atti­tudes: “Who wrote those jour­nals? When is she going to wise up? … I want to place warn­ing signs with flash­ing lights around all the fright­ened stereo­types of dis­abled peo­ple that lit­ter my jour­nal pages: Danger — Bad Attitude.” This is not, as Klein her­self puts it, a Triumph over Tragedy story. There’s no Hollywood end­ing where the hero rises above adver­sity so that every­one can get back to nor­mal. Normal, for Klein and her fam­ily, is dif­fer­ent now, and this book helps us under­stand that.