"Engrossing, lyrical, and consistently graceful, The Cane in the Cupboard offers an illuminating glimpse into the life of an excellent mind housed in an uncooperative body. Hailey Hughes writes with honesty and keen self-reflection, sharing insights that will resonate with the disabled and the nondisabled alike. An important and enlightening read."
-Rajia Hassib
Author of A Pure Heart.
"Wow, am I grateful that we have Hailey Leigh Hughes in the conversation around disability. Her discerning essays offer vivid anecdotes of experiencing cerebral palsy-not as a subject of pity, but rather one of inquiry and joy-situated in the complex landscape of a family's larger dynamics, life stories that are further enriched by Hughes' poetic flair for imagery and digression. The Cane in the Cupboard is a compelling, necessary read."
-Sandra Beasley
Author of Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life
"From her courageous and sensitive heart, Hughes' 'radical act' is to not only live happily despite social stigma, but to write powerfully and beautifully about living with disability. In refusing to hold back she reminds us acutely of our fundamental need to keep our humanity intact."
-Paul Casey
Author of home more or less
"The essays in Hailey Hughes' chapbook, The Cane in the Cupboard, are funny, poignant, and whip smart. In her first essay, "Family Encounters," Hughes announces the extraordinary circumstances of her birth: she and her three siblings are West Virginia's first surviving set of quadruplets. A wondrous fact but one with real body and lifelong consequences. 'This is my body; this is my life,' Hughes writes, and indeed, with grace and wit, Hughes reveals how she and two of the other quadruplets contend with significant and varying disabilities-that is, their bodies' stories across time. Hughes shows us how her body and the story of her body are shaped and stretched, limited and liberated by her extraordinary birth, by cerebral palsy, by her family and her faith, by considerations of travel, sex, and possible motherhood. Early on, Hughes asks, 'But what if all is not well after a birth?' While this is a question specific to the quadruplets' circumstances, she directs this question at her readers: nothing, really, can ever be 'all well' for any of us. Well enough, maybe, as we struggle with our shared frailties and insecurities, disappointments and ambitions."
-Kerry Neville
Author of Remember to Forget Me
"The essays of The Cane in the Cupboard invite you into an intimate conversation about the fraught disability/ability divide. Hailey Leigh Hughes writes with courage, humor, and grace."
-Melissa Scholes Youngâ¨
Author of Flood and Scrap Metal Baby
