September 21, 2025

Disability Books #5: "Death of the Author," "Hunchback"

Reflections on writing and disability in Nnedi Okorafor's "Death of the Author" and Saou Ichikawa's "Hunchback."

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Before I get started, I have a few recent bylines to share:

• “‘Women, Seated’ Shows How Precarity, Wealth, and ‘Having It All’ Are Not Just American Problems,” for Jezebel, an essay on one of my favorite books of the year. The author, translator, and editor were kind enough to speak to me for this; as always, I could only get a sentence or two from each of them in but they were all so fascinating, and editor Han Zhang in particular made me excited about the future of this new project from Riverhead to bring more fiction from China to America.

• “The Sadomasochistic Chain of Post-Soviet Society,” an interview for Electric Lit with Georgian writer Nino Haratischwili about her extraordinary new novel The Lack of Light, another of my favorites of the year.

• An interview with tennis writer Giri Nathan on his wonderful new book Changeover for Strung. Slightly less timely now that the US Open has finished, perhaps, but let’s be real, Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner (the subject of the book) will be playing all the big finals for the indefinite future, so this piece and Changeover will remain relevant for a long while…

I have a couple essays coming up soon too, which I’ll share in my next newsletter (hopefully sooner than 2.5 months from now, which is around how long it’s been since my last installment!).

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I don’t often read books I hate: when you read a lot of galleys, especially debuts, you wind up reading a lot of books that are only okay, but if I start reading a book and I think it’s truly awful, I stop reading. Sometimes, though, I find myself pushing through books that drive me absolutely nuts, and Nnedi Okorakfor’s Death of the Author was one such title. I kept listening to the (very well-produced) audiobook because the book started strong, and because I was especially piqued by Okarafor’s depiction of disability and wanted to write about it. So, here we are: I read so you don’t have to.¹ (I should also say in advance that this book has mostly received positive reviews.)

The premise of Death of the Author² intrigued me (and it, along with the book, evidently intrigued publisher William Morris, which bought the book for a million dollars): Nigerian-American writer Zelu, who is in her twenties, lives at home with her parents, partly due to being paraplegic as a result of a childhood accident, and partly as a result of her stalled career. Although her parents don’t approve of her chosen path, and family condescends to her, she is hell-bent on writing. After spending years on a (bad) literary novel that doesn’t sell, she throws herself into writing a sci-fi novel, Rusted Robots, that immediately captures the attention of her agent, then publishers, then the reading public at large. Her success challenges the limited ideas her family has of her abilities as a disabled person. Okorafor’s novel is interspersed with interviews from Zelu’s family members and friends, given after her mysterious death (foreshadowed in the book’s opening), and chapters from Rusted Robots.

The first chapter, told from Zelu’s sister’s point of view, introduces us to a flawed but interesting character, someone who has lost control after a great success—and is very sexually active (going against many stereotypes about disabled people). I thought the book would give readers a kaleidoscopic view of Zelu, perhaps without ever settling on one definitive “truth.” As the novel progressed, though, it became clear that the interview chapters were thrown in at random, and that Zelu’s narration dominated the book. (Reports of her death, it must be said, are also greatly exaggerated.)

This is fine in theory, but Zelu quickly becomes an exhausting narrator. While Okorafor, who herself has used a wheelchair (and still suffers from limited feeling in her legs, due to a botched scoliosis surgery), can write the kind of slights that disabled people face from their families and others with all too much accuracy—Zelu’s family treats her as a child well into her adulthood—Zelu herself is a flat character, someone who views everyone around her as an enemy and herself as a perpetual victim. This is often true, given her family’s horrendous treatment of her, but the family dynamic is similarly flat. While some families do treat some members with consistent cruelty, Okorafor doesn’t give Zelu’s family members enough personality to make the toxic family system feel real. Instead, they are a uniform wall of hate against which Zelu must fight and, inevitably, righteously win.

While I don’t know much about Okorafor’s life, it’s hard not to view this novel as a piece of personal wish fulfillment and vindication against people who wronged Okorafor herself. Late in the book, for instance, Zelu’s family changes their tune and declares her an inspiration and a hero, despite having consistently degraded her throughout the novel. This is the kind of fantasy many people with abusive families have, but that never actually takes place. Zelu also receives robotic legs, which allow her to walk (and run at miraculous speeds).

From a disability perspective, this plot twist is fraught at best. Many disabled writers and theorists, Eli Clare in particular, have written about cure narratives, and how damaging they can be to disabled people, who often would benefit more from improved accommodations and social benefits than quests for a (typically elusive cure). This isn’t the case for every disability—for people with debilitating chronic illnesses, like me, cures are very much desirable, if also unlikely to occur any time soon—and I understand why someone with paraplegia would want to be able to walk. In reality, though, this science doesn’t exist, but in Okorafor’s novel, it improves Zelu’s life in miraculous ways. Her family opposes her using them on religious grounds, once again placing them in the role of kill-joys, while a radio host who questions her on a disability ethics level (asking what message her using this inaccessible technology sends to her readers) is painted as a villain.

Zelu receives her robot legs after being contacted by a professor from MIT, a plot development that is echoed when a Jeff Bezos stand-in offers her the chance to go to space, fulfilling her childhood dream. Unlike the real Jeff Bezos (or Elon Musk), this character is warm and sympathetic, using his space program to highlight climate change (?), and Zelu relates to him because he is also misunderstood by the media. The irony of a Black, disabled writer (in reality, i.e. Okorafor, and in fiction, i.e. Zelu) presenting a Bezos figure as sympathetic, unlike virtually every other character in the book (all of whom challenge Zelu in some way), could not be more extreme.

Because Zelu is always presented as a victim—of her family, of her annoying fans, et cetera—she is always alone. She never connects with other disabled people, including online (where so much disabled community exists these days), considers the experience of other disabled people, or has a disabled friend (or any friends at all). Instead, she is exceptional: she has written the best sci-fi book ever (the excerpts included in the book are merely fine), she gets the robot legs, she gets to go to space. Fiction is supposed to make us understand each other; instead, Okorafor has written a character it is impossible to relate to or sympathize with because she is held apart from everyone around her, including her readers.

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As I was listening to Death of the Author, I found myself thinking about Saou Ichikawa’s extraordinary novel Hunchback, currently on the longlist for the NBA (and earlier this year, longlisted for the International Booker Prize). Written by a writer with congenital myopathy, it is told from the point of view of Shaka, a character with the same condition, who lives in a group care home that she owns, thanks to her wealthy parents investing on her behalf (they knew she would need support as an adult because of her disability).

Like Zelu, Shaka is a writer: in the book’s opening section, we read a pornographic story she’s written for an erotica website, titled “MY STEAMY THREESOME WITH SUPER-SEXY STUDENTS IN ONE OF TOKYO’S MOST SOUGHT-AFTER SWINGERS’ CLUBS.” Shaka, who is in her forties, is physically limited, but her mind is not limited by her body: she has sexual fantasies and fantasies about living a more “normal” life, unimpeded by her wheelchair and ventilator. As she writes on Twitter, “In another life, I’d like to work as a high-class prostitute”; “I’d have liked to try working at McDonald's”; “I’d like to know what it’s like to have an abortion.” (That one gets saved to drafts.) Yet some of the men in the home get flustered when they realize they’re discussing masturbation in front of “a young lady.” Shaka reflects that she is certainly not a young lady, but that due to her condition she looks much younger than she is; this, combined with the traditional de-sexualization of disabled people, makes people around her treat her as young and naive. We know, of course, from her inner life, that this couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Hunchback combines Shaka’s sexual fantasies with more serious considerations of her position as a disabled person in society. She spends much of her time doing online college classes, because she doesn’t have much else to do, but also because she is brilliant. Yet she resents the dominance of the printed book (“Japan … works on the understanding that disabled people don’t exist within society, so there are no such proactive considerations [as digital educational resources] made. Able-bodied Japanese people have likely never even imagined a hunchbacked monster struggling to read a physical book”). She goes on to criticize the publishing industry’s “ableist machismo”—a fascinating thread running through this novel, which has received huge attention and acclaim in the Japanese literary community she criticizes.

Unlike in Death of the Author, where Zelu’s book is not really connected to her life in a meaningful way, Shaka’s writing and intellectual pursuits reflect her interests and frustrations, while also subverting the reader’s ideas of both “serious” literary pursuits and disabled people as childlike, asexual beings. In fact, Shaka pursues a sexual liaison with one of her male aides, bribing him with an enormous sum of money to have sex with her. Ichikawa intersperses Shaka’s Twitter “posts” in some of these scenes: the aide, Tanaka, has figured out Shaka’s secret Twitter identity. In some backwards way, both Shaka and Tanaka are “writing” the interactions even as they are taking place in reality:

“You hate it when men say things like, ‘Come over here, baby,’ right?”

Hanging the [surgical] mask he’d taken off on the bed’s handrail, Tanaka smirked.

It makes my skin crawl when men say “Come over here, baby.” Although of course I have to write it because it’s part of the established script…

Maybe things like this ended up happening to me because I took to my personal Twitter account to vent with such abandon my grievances about my job writing Teens’ Love.

Writers are naturally observers, looking on from the sidelines of life, and being disabled often enforces this point of view as well. Yet Tanaka’s deployment of Shaka’s words is unnerving, as though he has stepped into her role of observer while also being an actor—but one whom she has paid. If this is all confusing, it is because the sequence of power and control in the novel is confusing. Who is “writing” the interaction? The physically compromised woman who has financial resources, or the able-bodied man who works for her?

Both Death of the Author and Hunchback conclude with twists. Death of the Author’s did not, for me, change anything about the book I was reading; Hunchback’s is deliberately opaque, recapitulating Ichikawa’s themes of sexuality, gender relations, and violence. She allows her reader to interpret the book you have read in several different ways, and emphasizes above all that you have read a work of fiction. Given that the book begins with Shaka’s own work of pornographic fiction, this conclusion seems appropriate. As with her liaison with Tanaka, it’s impossible to know how much of Shaka’s story is her own, and how much has been crafted by someone else—but Ichikawa remains, of course, the master of the text, and it is a text with a undercurrent of deep rage.

“Hunchback was my revenge,” she said upon winning the Akutagawa Prize in Japan, the first disabled author to do so. Ironically, I think Okorafor might describe Death of the Author this way, too. But only one book lands a knockout blow.