MEAN Little deaf Queer: A Memoir by Terry Galloway

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Book cover

Media coverage for the book
 

Publisher: Beacon Press
Hardcover: 248 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8070-7290-5

Available from:
Beacon Press
Amazon.com

For media inquiries
please contact:
Caitlin Meyer
cmeyer@beacon.org
Telephone: 617-948-6584
Fax: 617-742-2290

Praise

“Although Terry Galloway confesses a fondness for crappy memoirs, her own MEAN Little deaf Queer is anything but. It is funny, poignant, raw, uplifting, and exuberant. It is my new favorite book, and after you read it, it will be yours, too.”
Ann Hood, author of The Knitting Circle

“You don´t have to be mean, little, deaf, or queer to take heart from this miraculously unsentimental, deliriously funny, refreshingly spite-free, joyously weirdo-embracing memoir. All you have to be is human. Like Augusten Burroughs, Frank McCourt, and Mary Karr, Terry Galloway has written a memoir that transcends its hilarious particularities to achieve the universality of true art.”
Sarah Bird, author of How Perfect is That and The Mommy Club

“This is not your mother´s triumph-of-the-human-spirit memoir. Yes, Terry Galloway is resilient. But she´s also caustic, depraved, utterly disinhibited, and somehow sweetly bubbly, a beguiling raconteuse who periodically leaps onto the dinner table and stabs you with her fork. Her story will fascinate, it will hurt, and you will like it.”
Alison Bechdel, cartoonist Dykes to Watch Out For; Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“Terry Galloway has written a gripping memoir—at times harrowing, at times starkly moving—that chronicles a life beset by two enormous challenges: growing up gay in a very red State, and growing up deaf. Lesser mortals would fold, but Galloway navigates the highs and lows of her life with grace, insight, and unflinching candor. My hat´s off to her as an author, and as a fellow human being.”
—Doug Wright, author of Academy Award Nominated film Quills and the Pulitzer Prize winning play, I Am My Own Wife

“Terry Galloway has been cast by society as an outsider for most of her life, both in her queerness and her deafness, and I am reminded, reading her brilliant memoir, Mean Little deaf Queer, that most good writers create from an outsider position, a place of inner isolation and silent engagement with the deep issues of life. Terry Galloway has suffered in her life, but with great bravery, and she is indeed a very good writer who uses her lifelong separateness to reveal truths about the human heart that apply to us all.”
Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.

“This is a damn fine piece of work which is unbelievably powerful. This story is true and passionate and fearless and funny as hell when it is not heartbreaking. I expect this book to charm the hell out of great numbers of people, piss off a few, and give hope to many more...”

Back home

Since the publication of Mean Little deaf Queer in June 2009, Terry Galloway has visited over 13 different universities and almost as many book stores throughout the United States, giving readings from her memoir that were often coupled with performances of her autobiographically based solo show Out All Night & Lost My Shoes. She and Donna Marie Nudd, her partner, director, dramaturge, interpreter and traveling companion, have also given dozens of classroom presentations about the myriad intersections of queerness, disability and performance, using their compilation of disability themed comic video shorts The Mickee Faust Gimp Parade as a somewhat off-beat teaching tool.

Beacon Press will be releasing the paperback version of Mean Little deaf Queer in June 2010.
Terry’s at work now on two other books With her family members, including her sister Tenley Parr and her nephew Paul Dow Adams, she’s putting together a collection of life and death stories about the many animals buried in the nutrient rich dirt of the Ramshackle Ranch's pet cemetery She describes it as “the darker side to All Things Bright and Beautiful

She is also working on a sequel to Mean Little deaf Queer. Tenley suggested she call it Meaner ! deafer! Queerer! But on May 4th, after Terry undergoes surgery for her cochlear implant, that title will no longer be quite apt.

Look for Terry's upcoming video blog, sponsored by Beacon Press, about that operation, pet deaths and the sequel to Mean Little deaf Queer. Title suggestions welcomed!

... Book the Author

Terry Galloway

"For Terry, a lip-reader whose primary language is speech, a reading is an emotionally charged dialogue between her audience and herself. Each reading, although almost always shot through with humor, is a uniquely different experience."

Selected chapters include the much anthologized
"The Performance of Drowning",
Listen to it (MP3, 67 MB).

Yes, we are so so mesmerized by these photos
WE WANT TO BOOK HER!
TLGalloway@aol.com

© 2009 Terry Galloway.