Rebecca Sue: A Sister's Reflections on Disability, Faith, and Love — A review

Nicole Schrag introduces us to Kathleen Norris’s heartfelt and honest memoir of sisterhood, disability, and resilience.

Deep into her famous talk-turned-essay A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf wonders “what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say.” She proceeds to imagine the limitations that Renaissance institutions would have posed to this wonderfully gifted Judith, probing the barriers to education, space, and time that surely would have thwarted Shakespeare’s sister becoming the kind of virtuoso her brother turned out to be.

Kathleen Norris’s Rebecca Sue occupies a genre between memoir and biography, often raising questions about Norris’s younger sister, Becky*, that reminded me of Woolf’s hypotheticals. “I try not to indulge in what-if scenarios,” Norris writes, “but with my sister it was difficult not to wonder what Becky would have accomplished had she not suffered brain damage during birth” (105). Becky was born with perinatal hypoxia, having “been deprived of oxygen at a critical time during her birth,” resulting in “cognitive disabilities” and “behavioral disorders” (19-20). Her disabilities were the result of medical mismanagement during the birth.

In Rebecca Sue, Norris tells the story of Becky’s life, from infancy to her death in her late fifties. Despite being advised to institutionalize Becky at a young age, the family – which included Norris’s parents, her brother John (who was also older than Becky), and their baby sister, Charlotte – thought it only right and fitting to raise Becky in the home. She lived there for many years, remaining as it grew into an intergenerational household that included her nieces. After enduring years of bullying in school, she had a wonderful experience as a high school student at a boarding school in California. And she lived for many of her adult years in foster homes, always near family members.

Norris outlines Becky’s long-term struggles, from a persistent difficulty with the fundamentals of math to explosive anger to an obsessive desire for a romantic partner and sexual intimacy. But these struggles are presented alongside her gifts: Becky was always an artist, a writer, and a painter, and she was dedicated to her family. She was independent in many ways, and also very vulnerable. She had early experiences of sexual assault, bullying, and financial manipulation that left scars.

For high-achieving people who find themselves in caregiving roles, especially for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, Becky’s perspective and Norris’s model of caregiving offer a challenging but hopeful picture of what intimacy and growth can look like both in individual lives and relationships. Norris tells stories of hearing people who knew Becky near the end of her life describe her as “a woman without guile,” and marvels that those who knew Becky at an earlier stage of her life probably wouldn’t recognize her after she’d reached a degree of self-acceptance that allowed her peace. Their relationship was often marked by bitter comparison, as Becky wished that she could write a book and develop the kind of audience that her big sister had. Norris doesn’t pretend that their relationship reached the zenith of perfection. But she does show how Becky’s character – and her own, though more implicitly – exhibited the fruit of the spirit in increasingly abundant ways as she aged.

Although she doesn’t say it in quite these words, part of Norris’s struggle in the relationship is establishing common interests and shared activities that could help the two of them pass the time together. Both the asymmetry in their abilities and their differences in taste made it a challenge. When Norris returned to Hawai’i and became one of Becky’s primary caregivers in the later phase of Becky’s life, the two of them established a weekly ritual of going to the movies. “For years my goal in life was to find a movie that Becky would like and I could stand” (165). I laughed at this, recognizing in it several of my own relationships, especially with the younger members of my family. In this, too, Norris approaches learning to live with relational asymmetry.

And, at its best, the book is a powerful reminder that the professional worlds in which many readers of this blog are immersed — worlds of reading and writing, of coaching and counseling, of teaching and learning, of managing and administrating — are not the whole world, nor should they be.

Becky had been in so many mental health programs at a variety of facilities in Honolulu that she got to know many of the town misfits, the unfortunates you pass by on the streets but often don’t acknowledge as people with names or histories. She made me remember that these are the people Jesus encountered and loved, even though their illnesses had made them social outcasts.

This book is a fitting installment to follow Norris’s Acedia and Me, which was published in 2008, nearly twenty years ago. In that book, written after the death of her husband, David Dwyer, from cancer, Norris describes caretaking, depression, marriage, and her journey to becoming a Benedictine oblate. Rebecca Sue returns to many of these themes but with a kind of quiet honesty and humility that I found really moving. Those who have read Acedia and Me might remember that one of its central subjects is writing and centers Norris’s experiences of being a writer. Writers writing about their writing, as pleasurable as it often is to read, requires a certain amount of navel gazing. Rebecca Sue does document Norris’s experiences of her relationship with her sister, some of which include her identity as a writer. But the moments when Norris engages in self-reflection are fewer and farther between, and they have a kind of brevity that denies self-indulgence.

But they are nonetheless incredibly powerful. Norris reminds us that there are many among us who, like her, find themselves occupying both a professional world of high achievement and a caregiving role that demands a lot. It might be a friend whose child is on the autism spectrum, or a colleague who is caring for a grandparent who is dying a long, slow death. It might be someone whose partner is dealing with significant mental illness. Whether we are in that caregiving role or witnessing the lives of others steeped in it, Rebecca Sue offers a gentle reminder of how the redeeming work of Christ comes through suffering, and that there are aspects of our suffering that may not be resolved, at least not in ways that we can comprehend.

I’ll end with a word from Norris:

I believe that there are many circumstances in which praising and giving thanks means that we’re not clinging to what we wanted but accepting what life has handed us. It’s not positive thinking, or looking “on the bright side.” It’s a realism that can endure deep darkness and detect the grace that exists even in distressing circumstances. It’s up to us to recognize such grace and open our hearts to receive it. Our great consolation is knowing that God is present wherever we are, even when we’re walking in a desert, in the shadow of death. Becky believed this to her dying day. (208-9)

* Throughout the review, I’ll stick to convention in referring to the author as Norris and to her sister as Becky, as Norris does in the memoir, though I am mindful that doing so risks over-emphasizing the asymmetries in the relationship that Norris takes pains to push back against. To Becky, Norris is Kathy.

You can purchase Rebecca Sue by Kathleen Norris anywhere books are sold, including InterVarsity Press. Read an excerpt from the book here, courtesy of InterVarsity Press.

Photo by Anna Kolosyuk on Unsplash