JOIN/UNJOIN: A Hearing Son's Journey to Find the Deaf Mother He Never Knew

This book began as a collection of short stories for an Honors nonfiction writing seminar. What started as a menagerie of essays about my mother’s Deafness, struggle with alcoholism and drug addiction, and eventual battle with end-stage liver disease, slowly grew into a narrative about a hearing son’s search for identity and belonging between two worlds, Deaf and Hearing, each one comfortably foreign. At its core, this narrative is an attempt to collapse disordered binaries: mother and son, hearing and deaf, living and dying, united and estranged. The book’s title, Join-Unjoin, is an American Sign Language translation, or gloss, for the breaking of a relationship.