This post was originally published on Audible.com.
In her first memoir, bestselling author of True Biz and deaf rights advocate Sara Nović dives into what it means to have a mother tongue, why it looks different for everyone, and shares how becoming a parent has radicalized her. Combining Nović‘s own personal experience with deaf history and poignant reflections on American history, Mother Tongue is an audiobook that takes its own advice—embracing the nuance of life and celebrating being in “the middle.”
Michael Collina: While this book focuses on your own personal experience as a deaf person and as a mother, it also incorporates a lot of history. What made you decide to write what you refer to as a “hybrid memoir” after having such success with your fiction?
Sara Nović: Mother Tongue actually started out as letters to my two sons—one biological and hearing, and the other adopted and deaf—about the histories and cultures that belong to them. As the project grew, that structure changed. Initially, I had planned to parcel out different anecdotes and information to each of them, and along the way I realized that separating them, and different facets of any of our identities, was both impossible and unnecessary.
That realization ultimately changed the scope of the project so I could include research about the adoption industry, the religious right, and other areas of our lives, but I'm especially proud that this is a mainstream book that collects deaf history in a central location. I was chatting with the fact-checker for this book who is a very skilled deaf historian, and she said this is the first non-academic book to include the latest research about the Martha's Vineyard deaf community, for example—she was really excited that some myth-busting could have the potential to reach a larger audience, and so am I.
Did you find your writing process was different than it was for your novels?
Not that different, actually. As much as I am jealous of the organized writers out there who can work from outlines or have cute little cork boards with color-coded index cards, now having finished my fourth book it doesn't seem like I am ever going to become that guy. For me, writing is an exploratory process. I think I've seen another writer liken it to walking in darkness with a flashlight, and only being able to see a little at a time as you move forward, and that metaphor certainly fits for me. I wrote scenes and historical tracts as they came to me, and moved them around a lot to reach the book's final structure, which is basically how I write fiction, too. At times it's a frustrating process, but it's also what makes writing fun. I think I would probably get bored if I knew where I was going or what I wanted to say from the onset.
The only thing that was starkly different about this book was that I was more fastidious with my research hygiene. When writing fiction, I can consume research materials as background information to think about while I create a new world and then eventually let those things go, but with this book, I really wanted readers to be able to return to the research if they wanted it, so I was strict about keeping track of those works. The complete endnotes for the book are available on my website, organized by both page number and key word so people across editions can find what they're looking for.
Mother Tongue is such an impactful and evocative title. Can you share what it means to you?
I actually wrote the sentence, "What is a mother tongue and how do you get one?" a long time ago, before I had children. Linguistics and language acquisition has always been something that fascinated me, so it was a phrase that intrigued me and stayed with me since. It's particularly complicated in the context of signed language, since 90 percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents, creating a gap between family members' mother tongues. "Mother tongue" doesn't quite directly translate into ASL—does it mean your first language? Your parents' language? Your primary language in everyday life? How the title gets translated into sign is something I've been playing with and chatting with other deaf people about how they'd sign the phrase; I suspect folks' answers will have a lot to do with their language access as children, and I hope to share those interviews soon.
Though you dive into your path out of the hearing world and into the deaf community, you also reflect on your experience as the mother of a hearing child and a deaf child. Did you learn anything about yourself or your approach to parenting while writing Mother Tongue?
Mother Tongue looks a lot at the ways parents and children can differ from one another, and some of the ways we as parents can leave our kids wanting in those gaps. So, in writing about that from my own experience as a child, I was able to examine how I might be prone to, or should avoid, repeating certain cycles. I often say that being a parent radicalized me, and that was amplified through the writing process—taking a magnifying glass to things like international adoption, the Church, and the education and health care systems has made me even more passionate about my work as an advocate and a mom.
Your life-experiences position that you describe as “the space between,” how has that position helped your ability to recognize when your children need different things from you as a parent?
Knowing that we needn't fit into a strict binary on anything is freeing as a parent and a human—it is wondrous to me to see my kids be such skilled code-switchers, and to feel no shame about being "in the middle," which was obviously something that took me so much longer to learn. As parents, I think being open to this grey middle, and honest with ourselves and our kids that we will mess up, is more than half the battle. There's a lot of talk about the failings of millennial parenting (and hey, there are many), but I appreciate that our generation has normalized apologizing to our kids.
You also detail how our world is not built with deaf and hard-of-hearing people in mind. How would you recommend people help to foster a more welcoming, inclusive, and equitable world?
Hearing folks almost always build first—an event, an app, a business, etc.—and then think about accessibility later. Or more often, they don't think about it at all, and then deaf and hard-of-hearing people are forced to do a lot of extra labor to beg for, and then organize, accommodations. In turn, the hearing people feel frustrated and resistant to changing the thing they worked hard on and felt was finished. But what if an event or app (or whatever) was planned with accessibility in mind from the jump, and disabled people didn't have to harangue the creators into being included? Not only would this be more equitable, but it's probably less labor and cost-intensive, too, as retrofitting accessibility onto something designed narrowly can be expensive and time-consuming.
There's a common saying in the disabled community: "Accessibility isn't an extra step; it's a step you missed," and I think that way of framing it can be helpful. The easiest way to make sure something is following the principles of universal design and is accessible to as many folks as possible is to have disabled people not only at the table (which is the typical idea of "inclusion," that we should just be grateful to be in proximity to the "normal" people), but also respected and listened to as equal members of the process.
