May 3, 2010
It’s staggering to conceive of a moment in an 11-year-old girl’s life when she is informed by her doctor that she will never recover from the effects of the polio that left her suddenly paralyzed from the neck down and that she won’t likely live much longer. Mason writes eloquently and without a tinge of self-pity of her long, nightmarish journey from September 1948, when her beloved 13-year-old brother, Gaston, died of polio and she contracted it soon after; confined to an iron lung, she rarely left it for the next 61 years, while living in their rural Lattimore, N.C., home so that her devoted mother could care for her. Yet Mason was determined to transcend the limitations of her inert body: she always wanted to be a writer, and, with her indomitable Job-like mother’s help, finished not only high school with honors but college at Wake Forest, where she participated in the cause of racial equality and was invited to join Phi Beta Kappa. Mason writes breezily of her life before the polio, when she was a carefree, competitive, bike-riding girl in Southern cotton-growing country. Eventually, her mother slipped into dementia, sometimes lashing out violently, but Mason maintains a wonderful writerly detachment from her material, turning her remarkable life into a vivid, exalted, truly humbling tale of inspiration.