Books

Author’s life a winding path of queerness, art, pride and disability lineage

Fink explores familial exclusion in new book

Published

4 years ago

April 14, 2022

Jennifer Natalya Fink

When Jennifer Natalya Fink, 55, an English professor and director of the Disabilities Studies program at Georgetown University, was growing up, her grandfather’s house overflowed with his extended family – from aunts to second cousins.

“Though my gruff grandfather argued with everyone,” Fink, who is queer and Jewish, writes in her new book “All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship,” “his household included far-flung family members in his ever-expanding mishpacha–Yiddish for family, extended family, and that aunt who’s really just your mother’s best friend.”

Yet one family member wasn’t welcome there, Fink, who is married to a Korean-American, gender nonconforming spouse, told the Blade in an interview. She never saw her first cousin, Cousin XY, (her grandfather’s grandson) at family gatherings.

As a child, Fink knew that she had a cousin who no one mentioned. A geneticist’s daughter, she named her “lost” cousin “Cousin XY.”

“My grandfather had an expanded idea of family,” Fink said, “But Cousin XY had Down syndrome.”

Fink’s grandfather was a doctor. His mishpacha included vulnerable people who were unable to provide for themselves. But “there wasn’t room for someone with an extra chromosome,” Fink said, “he said my aunt and uncle should ‘give away’ their child with Down Syndrome.”

There was so much shame around disability when Cousin XY was born, Fink said. “It was like how it was for me growing up queer in the 1970s and 1980s,” she said. “No one talked about it then. The stories of queer people were erased.”

Her grandfather’s vision of family had “one limit,” Fink said. “It didn’t include disability.”

After he was born, Cousin XY was taken from his parents. At first, a nurse cared for him. Then, he was institutionalized.

“Cousin XY’s story was erased,” Fink said. “He wasn’t even given a name.”

The 1970s was the “tail end” of the mass institutionalization of disabled people, Fink said.

Institutionalization of people with disabilities is much less common now. “Yet disabled people are still often being culturally and psychologically delineated from our idea of family,” Fink said.

Nearly one in five people has a disability, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. So, it’s not surprising that Fink’s family (like many families) has had more than one disabled person in its history.

Fink’s grandmother Adina was extremely hard of hearing. “Yet, we never talked about her deafness,” Fink said. “She took no pride in her disability.”

Just as, until recently, many families erased the stories of their LGBTQ mother, fathers, husbands, wives, children, grandmas, grandpas – “guncles,” families still erase disabled people from their family history.

Fink, born in Washington, D.C., grew up in Ithaca, N.Y. “Growing up, I felt like I was the only queer person in the universe,” Fink said, “being queer wasn’t considered to be ‘normal.’”

Many families have at least one family member who is LGBTQ. Fink’s parents were loving and liberal. But, when she was young, “it was as if there had never ever been a queer person in my family,” Fink said. “It felt like being cut off from my family’s story.”

Now, Fink’s parents are supportive of her sexual orientation.

In this era of LGBTQ pride, being queer is more often seen not as “abnormal” or “traumatic” but as a “normal” part of being human.

This hasn’t been the case for disabled people, Fink said.

The stigma and shame around disability became up close and personal for Fink when her daughter Nadia Sohn Fink, now 15, was two-and-a-half-years old.

Then, Fink learned that Nadia was autistic. Fink was gobsmacked.

Nadia, who is biracial, was an intelligent, playful child. Now Nadia is a bright teen who writes stories and poetry.

“It felt traumatic to get this paper saying Nadia is autistic,” Fink said, “as if we were being cut off from what is normal.”

Fink, who isn’t disabled, had internalized society’s perceptions of disability. She’d imbibed the ableist Kool Aid: the idea that disability is shameful – that disabled people should be feared, patronized and/or shunned.

To deal with her daughter’s autism diagnosis, Fink leaned into her experience of being queer.

“Because I’m queer, I’m used to being an outsider,” she said, “I drew on what I know of homophobia. On what it’s like to be excluded – to be considered abnormal – not a part of the family.”

Fink is an introvert. “If I weren’t queer, I’d never have gone into a bar,” she joked.

But connecting with other LGBTQ people had made her feel pride in herself. Her queer connection made her feel part of a chosen family and think about her family of origin’s stories.

She and Nadia connected with other autistic people and their families. Fink came to think of being disabled not as something to be ashamed of, but as a normal part of being human.

Fink began to look into her family’s disability history. She found that Rhona (now deceased), another cousin in the United Kingdom, had Down Syndrome. Rhona, Fink discovered, led a happy, fulfilled life.

“Rhona lived with her family through her childhood,” Fink said, “her mother started a progressive care center where Rhona lived the rest of her life.”

There’s a parallel between families being out and proud about their queer and disability history, Fink said.

“Reclaiming your family’s disability stories will change how you think about disability,” Fink said.

Take her hard-of-hearing grandmother. Fink now looks on her grandmother’s disability with pride. “She didn’t transcend her disability,” Fink said, “but because she was hard-of-hearing, my grandmother had to pay attention. She was a great listener.”

Fink’s daughter Nadia feels pride in her disabled ancestors. “Disability lineage empowers me,” Nadia emailed the Blade, “To know my people were always there. To know I have a people.”

Creativity runs in the Fink family. Like her daughter, Fink is a writer. She was the winner of the Dana Award for the novel and of the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Fiction.

“I write experimental fiction,” said Fink who was a Lambda Literary Award finalist for her 2018 novel “Bhopal Dance.”

“Bhopal Dance” “focuses on disaster, activism, white savior complex, and queer world making,” Corinne Manning wrote in the “Lambda Literary Review. “The book is an astonishing sun-posed magnifying glass on our radical failures and desires.”

In 1988, Fink graduated from Wesleyan University with a bachelor’s degree in a self-designed major in feminist performance art. She earned an M.F.A. in performance from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1990 and a Ph.D. in performance studies from New York University in 1997.

For a time, Fink was based in New York City, where she supervised art teachers in public schools. She noticed that often there were no books, and that the students were frequently alienated from books.

But “the kids loved to draw, paint, cartoon, etc.,” Fink said, “I learn best through making. So did these kids.”

To promote youth literacy, Fink was one of the founders of the (now defunct) Gorilla Press.

Fink’s life has been a winding path of queerness, art, pride and disability lineage. She wears her grandmother’s ring to honor her disability ancestors.

You can’t help but think that her grandmother would be proud.

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Books

Exploring Renée Richards’s life through lens of a trans author

Surprises await in new book about pioneering tennis star

Published

2 days ago

August 22, 2026

Terri Schlichenmeyer

(Book cover image courtesy of HarperOne)

‘Finding Renée Richards’
By Julie Kliegman
c.2026, HarperOne
$28.99/272 pages

Come on in, the water’s fine.

Wade into it up to your ankles, your calves, your waist, you’ll be OK. You’ll adjust to the waves that swirl around you so come on, dive in, it’s all good. As in the new book “Finding Renée Richards” by Julie Kliegman, that goes for swimming, and for controversy.

Assigned to do a story on books written by trans tennis great Renée Richards, Julie Kleigman read the books and became “transfixed by a woman who had fought so hard to simply live as who she had long known she was….”. Their editor had figured that, as a nonbinary and trans individual, Kleigman would have “something incisive to say…” in an article. Instead, once they met and began interviewing Richards, Kliegman was left frustrated.

Born in the late summer of 1934, Richard Henry Raskind seemed to have arrived with a tennis racket in his hand. His mother was a psychiatrist; his father was an orthopedic surgeon who hoped “Dick” would follow his footsteps but Raskind was drawn instead to ophthalmology and tennis. He was also irresistibly drawn to wearing women’s clothing.

His sister knew of this pull and Raskind eventually came out to both parents, but few others on the tennis circuit were aware. When Raskind visited his hometown of New York City, however, he enjoyed furtively going out in women’s clothing but he also tried to squash the desire; in the meantime, he fell in love, married, fathered a son, and eventually learned that it was possible to become the woman he knew he really was.

To continue playing tennis professionally was a bonus.

And right there were the disagreements Kleigman had with Richards.

Richards, “To this day… [makes] a point of describing herself as a woman, period,” says Kleigman, but she firmly acknowledged Richard, almost as a separate individual, insisting that Kleigman use “him/his” pronouns when describing her earlier life.

And as for tennis and trans women’s participation in the sport, Richards had something even more frustrating to say.

Take that as a fair warning: you might be equally surprised at what author Julie Kliegman uncovered in “Finding Renée Richards,” and you may be truly gobsmacked by reading opinions from other women about the topic of trans women in sports.

That’s the main, huge point of interest in this fascinating book; the other is Richards’s life as seen through the lens of a trans individual. Kleigman’s wrestling with the 90-year-old Richards’ firmly dug-in heels is, in itself, worth your time as a study of highly varying viewpoints. That Kleigman and Richards have both lived at least a part of trans history is somewhat of a key to understanding how this book unfolds, as Kleigman offers up Richards’s tale. Readers who are able to read between the lines will be riveted.

If you’re a sports fan and you have opinions, you must read this book – and that goes double if it’s tennis you love. Also check out “Finding Renée Richards” if you just want a raucously good and very fine read.

The Blade may receive commissions from qualifying purchases made via this post.

Books

Bros + romance + fantasy = ‘Bromantasy.’

New book a romp full of humor, dragons, kings, and adventure

Published

1 week ago

August 15, 2026

Terri Schlichenmeyer

(Book cover image courtesy of G.P. Putnam's Sons)

‘Bromantasy’
By Maire Roche
c.2026, G.P. Putnam’s Sons
$20/339 pages

“Danger” just happens to be your middle name.

Any fray, any tussle, anytime anybody needs help, they count on you to step in and save the day. You’re brave, smart and strategic, kind to old people, children, and small animals and, as in the new book “Bromantasy” by Maire Roche, dragons.

Of all the things there were to do – preserving food, keeping house for himself and his best friend Morningthall “Mo” Elmthorn, advanced skincare, and drinking at the local tavern down the road – the one thing Juniper O’Reilly couldn’t resist was a good brawl. It happened so often that Juniper honestly looked forward to it, though Mo wasn’t a fan.

Mo was more grown-up, calm, thoughtful, able, and Juniper loved him for it. He loved Mo, in fact, since they were little boys. He loved Mo in ways that they didn’t talk about, so they kept a wall between their bedrooms in their cottage.

Except for that one time.

They didn’t talk about that, either.

Instead, as they did often, on a warm fall night, Juniper and Mo went to the tavern, where mead was served and they could learn about the king’s weekly quests. There, Juniper could also find a good brawl, which is how he and Mo accidentally got into trouble: Juniper trounced one of the king’s men and was forced into a quest.

He didn’t want to fight dragons and he felt bad that Mo had been dragged along. He felt even worse leaving their farm, sleeping on the ground, wearing the same clothes every day, and not having enough skincare product along. A campfire added to the problem. A roving, lying prince, also in search of dragons, didn’t help. And though a quest was no place for a child, Juniper and Mo found a frightened little girl they had no choice but to protect.

A child with strange eyes, sharp teeth, and fire on her breath.

“And just like that, Juniper and Mo had a dragon.”

Bros + romance + fantasy = “Bromantasy.” It also could equal one of two other things: a romp full of humor, dragons, kings, princes, and adventure.

Or it could equal a whole lot of eye-rolling.

It’s a fact that this book is funny, in the way that a 1980s high school comedy movie is funny – meaning that it’s dippy, giddy, and very caricaturish but you’ll laugh quite often. The story contains everything you want in a fantasy romance (a “romantasy”), including human-like alternate species, a life-changing journey, and plenty of nudge-nudge-wink skirting around the attraction the two main characters have for one another. It’s a decent story, convoluted in just the right way. Purely, it’s an escape.

So why wouldn’t you want to read it? See above, and depending on your favorite reading genre. High-brow literature, this ain’t.

For the right reader, “Bromantasy” is a decent-enough vacation read, something not too taxing or hard on the brain. It’s for novel lovers, dragon hunters, king’s questers, princes, and romantics. For everyone else, this tale is just middling.

The Blade may receive commissions from qualifying purchases made via this post.

Books

Something’s off about Dad. When is it time to step in?

‘When Memory Fades’ can help when families face dementia

Published

2 weeks ago

August 8, 2026

Terri Schlichenmeyer

(Book cover image courtesy of St. Martin's Essentials)

‘When Memory Fades’
By Nathaniel Chin, MD
c.2026, St. Martin’s Essentials
$30/422 pages

Mom called you in a panic the other day.

She’d lost her keys and by the time you arrived to help, she’d found them. In the refrigerator.

These kinds of things keep happening, not often but often enough, and you don’t know quite what to worry about. But in the new book “When Memory Fades” by Nathaniel Chin, MD, you’ll learn about the journey ahead, for both of you.

You can’t remember why you walked into a room. You got lost last week, going to the bank. Popular wisdom says that things like that are normal as we age, but Chin says that’s not true – although the answer may not be a worst-case scenario, either. Yes, memory problems could just be signs of stress, dehydration, or lack of sleep – or is it time to see a doctor?

Chin says maybe, yes.

He was working his way through medical residency when his father, a geriatrician in Madison, Wisc., was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Chin, now a geriatrician, was blindsided, but that diagnosis also changed his life.

Here, he writes about the brain, and how Alzheimer’s and dementia are diagnosed, explaining that dementia has many faces and, depending on a doctor’s evaluation, memory problems might be slowed or improved. He shares his father’s illness with readers, but he also writes about his mother, a steadfast, steady caretaker.

Her story reminds reader-guardians to care for themselves, too.

Know how to talk the talk, so that you can have “a more productive” conversation with your doctor. Understand that there’s nothing “normal” about dementia or Alzheimer’s. Know the statistics – African Americans are affected with dementia twice as much as whites – and know how to lower your risks. Learn here what questions to ask, how to break the news to everyone, and any legal matters that will be important soon. And know how to tend to you.

Says Chin, “The best action you can take is to educate yourself… The more you understand, the better equipped you are to make sound judgments.”

Something’s off about Dad, just a lot of little things that don’t add up. When is it time to step in? “When Memory Fades” can help you decide.

Wise, wide-spread, comprehensive, and compassionately helpful, this is a book you can read and then take it to the doctor with your loved one. It’s a book that makes sense when nothing else does, and its biggest feature is that it smoothly transitions from easy-to-grasp science and charts, to gentle coaching for caregivers. Author Nathaniel Chin, MD writes with storytelling, humility, grace, and experience from both sides of the Alzheimer’s/dementia issue, and his words are reassuring but also urgent. Learn, but don’t wait, he says. Know how to safeguard yourself. See your doctor, and don’t fear testing. Watch for signs of depression. And never, ever stop asking for help.

Read those last seven words, and find “When Memory Fades” now. It’s a book to have on your shelf, whether you’re 45 or 95 because, as you’ll see, dementia happens and knowledge is key.