RADIO HEAD GAL

Knill offers a memoir of her life with profound hearing loss and the lessons she’s learned.

In the 1960s, the author was born with deafness, but she wasn’t formally diagnosed until she was in grade school, largely due to her mother’s refusal to acknowledge her situation. One of Knill’s teachers gloomily predicted that Knill would probably be unable to get a job; the author later became a vice president at Wells Fargo.The author chronicles the trials and tribulations of navigating a world designed for people without hearing loss; at one point, she notes how even well-meaning people disrupted the proper function of her hearing aids with overenthusiastic hugs. Knill decided in 2003 to get cochlear implants: “Audiologists became my partners, tech support for my radio head, and intrepid scientists who reveled in their quest to discover the precise configurations for impeccable sound quality.” However, the author says that she still sometimes removes her implant processors to enjoy the silence—something that hearing people, she says, often have a hard time understanding. Over the course of this memoir, Knill effectively advocates for overcoming assumptions that people with deafness face—starting with the notion that anyone who can’t hear must want to hear. Her prose is clear and straightforward, whether she’s offering tips on how to talk around people with hearing loss (such as waiting until the person looks at you and is no more than six feet away before speaking), exploring the ramifications of ableism, or discussing unexpected side-effects of cochlear implantation. Overall, readers will find this to be a unique blend of self-reflection and astute societal commentary that challenges them to reexamine the ways that they interact with the world around them.

A compassionate and inspirational remembrance.