A Nearly Normal Life

In the summer of 1953 Charles Mee was a carefree, athletic boy of fourteen. But after he collapsed during a school dance one night, he was suddenly bedridden, drifting in and out of consciousness, as his body disintegrated into a shadow of its former self. He had been stricken with spinal polio. When Mee emerged from the grip of the disease, he was confronted with a life change so enormous that it challenged all he had believed in and forced him, despite his young age, to redefine himself. His once stereotypically normal life, filled with baseball and swimming pools and dreams of girls, had been irreversibly altered. He was almost the same person he had been; he was nearly normal.Mee's moving personal narrative is a textured portrait of life in the fifties — a time when America and her fighting spirit collided with this disease. Both funny and profound, Mee is a gifted, unique writer, who unravels the mysteries of youth in a Cold War climate, who gives voice to the mind of a child with a potentially fatal disease, and whose recognition of himself as a disabled outsider heightens his brilliant talents as a storyteller.