Diving into Glass: On Caro Llewellyn's Autobiography
George Orwell once famously said, ‘Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.’ It’s why I read ‘Diving into Glass’, by Caro Llewellyn. Who wouldn’t want to read a book which described how the daughter of one of Australia’s most revered founders of the disability rights movement planned to set her crippled father on fire? I wasn’t disappointed. But not for the reasons you’d expect. It took Caro Llewellyn fifteen years to muster the courage to write this book – I read it in one sitting, gulping it down like a lavish Christmas dinner. And if some parts of this tale are exceptionally raw in its often brutal candour, the writing is all the more hard hitting for it. There is power in truth telling, no matter whose truth it is. Caro wrote this book from the perspective of a disabled woman – like me, she has a degenerative disability. She’s also written it from the perspective of a daughter of a man with polio and high support needs, fifty years ago.