Maybelle and Alison Piepmeier. Source: Trey Piepmeier

      Alison had always explored other kinds of writing. She wrote poetry in college, and as George argues in his chapter, her blog contains some of her best writing. Read in sequence, the blog entries can be understood as a single essay. (Indeed, the blog can be seen as a proving ground for this book, a place to mix the minutiae of everyday life with feminist analysis.) But for Alison, this was a new kind of book. It both differs from, and grows out of, her work on nineteenth-century women’s writing (Out in Public: Configurations of Women’s Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America); on zines (Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism); or, with co-editor Rory Dicker, on third-wave feminism (Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century). It shares with previous work her interest in women, the body, popular culture, and activism.

      From the beginning, her insights about gender were inflected by an understanding of the intersections of race and class. As a scholar trained in literary studies, Alison was keenly aware that representations matter. Not only do they reflect prevailing social beliefs, but they also have the power to unsettle, and even transform, dominant attitudes. She was interested in women as social and historical agents, as makers and doers actively engaged in shaping the realities under which they lived. Alison also knew that feminist knowledge is situated knowledge. Even at her most scholarly, she was always present in her writing—her vivid sense of voice and her passions, commitments, and beliefs evident on the page. Her new book was meant to connect her scholarly and theoretical preoccupations with her personal experience and to reach beyond a purely academic audience.

      As Alison’s conception of the book evolved, the idea of story remained, a common thread among her varied approaches. She was fascinated by the power of narrative to help and to harm. A parent’s experiences can yield stories that dehumanize their subjects, particularly in the case of intellectual disability, but a different story about the same experiences can recognize dignity and personhood, replacing reduction with complexity. As Alison showed in her study of parent memoirs, these opposing impulses often coincide. While Alison never had the chance to fully theorize her interest in narrative, her approach was in keeping with scholarship in disability studies and medical humanities that recognizes the power of personal stories to serve as a kind of embodied theory. As Elaine Scarry wrote in her influential study The Body in Pain, although pain is a source of unmaking that robs the subject of language, the world is remade through artistic creation.3

      Alison understood the inevitability of story, the way it functions to organize experience and beliefs.4 She recognized how those who have experienced pain or oppression use narrative to make and to remake an imperfect social world. Her work intersected with the project of narrative medicine in acknowledging the reparative power of telling stories and learning how to listen and interpret the stories of others.5

      A particular concern in this book is how women use stories to organize their experiences of pregnancy and motherhood. Alison sees how the memoir can challenge well-known narratives about illness and disability, redefining what it means to live with physical and cognitive differences. In this book, Alison analyzes stories about disability, pregnancy, and motherhood but also tells stories of her own. For Alison, narrative at its best is the agent of complexity; in her evolving manuscript, she takes a complex approach, both as storyteller and as critic. Her primary commitment in this book is to understand the capacity of stories to work imaginative transformation that can have real-world consequences.

      Throughout her research, she sought out and listened to a wide range of stories, told primarily by women. Alison’s method involved intensive listening punctuated by questions, comments, and affirmations. Her more finished work combines summary and analysis with long passages that allow the interviewees’ voices to come through directly. The interviews she had already completed represent a considerable diversity of perspectives on Down syndrome, including those from women who had abortions after a prenatal diagnosis and perspectives from parents of varied faith, class, and racial backgrounds at different stages of parenting. Much of that work is represented here.

      With more time, Alison certainly would have thought further not just about the content of these narratives but also about their form. She was already beginning to ask about the affordances of memoir, why stories about the arrival and parenting of children with disabilities share a similar narrative arc, and the consequences of following different paths in telling stories about disability. She might well have spent time identifying the common features of women’s stories about prenatal and postnatal diagnoses and parenting children with disabilities. Among her unfinished work was an ongoing reflection on the formal similarities