09/13/2009 5:00 pm
It's described as Running with Scissors meets The Liar's Club, an apt portrayal of Terry Galloway's edgy and wickedly hilarious memoir Mean Little deaf Queer (Beacon Press).
When Galloway was born on Halloween, no one knew that an experimental antibiotic given to her mother had wreaked havoc on her fetal nervous system. After her family moved from Berlin, Germany, to Austin, Texas, hers became a deafening, hallucinatory childhood where everything, including her own body, changed for the worse. But those unwelcome changes awoke in this particular child a dark, defiant humor that fueled her lifelong obsessions with language, duplicity, and performance. "This is not your mother¹s triumph-of-the-human-spirit memoir. Yes, Terry Galloway is resilient. But she's also caustic, depraved, utterly disinhibited, and somehow sweetly bubbly, a beguiling raconteuse who periodically leaps onto the dinner table and stabs you with her fork. Her story will fascinate, it will hurt, and you will like it." -- Alison Bechdel, cartoonist and author of Fun Home. Terry Galloway has achieved international critical acclaim with her solo shows Out All Night and Lost My Shoes and Lardo Weeping‹or Why Five Bucks Is Paradise. In Austin Texas she is widely known for her cross-dressing Shakespearean performances, as a founding member of Esther's Follies, the Southwest¹s longest running cabaret theater and as the founder of the Actual Lives Writing and Performance Workshop for adults with disabilities. In Tallahassee she is the cigar puffing, beer guzzling rat persona Mickee Faust, head cheese of the queer-run theater group of the same name. She has received awards from the NEA, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Public Radio News Directors, Inc., the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs and the Texas Institute of Letters. She resides in Tallahassee with her partner in life and art Donna Marie Nudd. "When Galloway was 10, she proclaimed herself a "child freak," and by the standards of the world around her she wasn't wrong. Deaf with bad eyes and queer with a hard sense of humor, Galloway's account of her survival induces the most uncomfortable laughter of the season." --Out Magazine Location:
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