Another Story Bookshop and Wolsak and Wynn present the Toronto launch for
Falling for Myself by Dorothy Ellen Palmer
An evening to commemorate the UN International Day of Persons with Disabilites
Monday, December 2nd @ 7pm
Theatre Centre - 1115 Queen St West
Featuring a reading by Dorothy Palmer with special guest Eufemia Fantetti
RSVP on Facebook
Accessibility info: The Theatre Centre has an entrance accessible via an e-door and a ramp. The bathroom is gender neutral with an e-door. The event will take place in the incubator space, which has a flat perimeter and a recessed space with folding chairs and a temporary ramp.
In this searing and seriously funny memoir Dorothy Ellen Palmer falls down, a lot, and spends a lifetime learning to appreciate it. Born with congenital anomalies in both feet, then called birth defects, she was adopted as a toddler by a wounded 1950s family who had no idea how to handle the tangled complexities of adoption and disability. From repeated childhood surgeries to an activist awakening at university to decades as a feminist teacher, mom, improv coach and unionist, she tried to hide being different. But now, in this book, she's standing proud with her walker and sharing her journey. With savvy comic timing that spares no one, not even herself, Palmer takes on Tiny Tim, shoe shopping, adult diapers, childhood sexual abuse, finding her birth parents, ableism and ageism. In Falling for Myself, she reckons with her past and with everyone's future, and allows herself to fall and get up and fall again, knees bloody, but determined to seek Disability Justice, to insist we all be seen, heard, included and valued for who we are.
My Father, Fortune-tellers & Me: A Memoir is a powerful and witty coming-of-age story of fate versus free will. As the daughter of southern Italian immigrants joined in an acrimonious arranged marriage, Eufemia Fantetti weathered the devastating consequences of her mother’s treatment-resistant schizophrenia for years before moving to the West Coast to escape the constant turmoil. In her search for meaning beyond a host of ancestral superstitions—malocchio, maledictions and stregheria—she writes, cracks jokes, meets counselors, studies the sky for planetary alignment, consults her trusty tarot deck for guidance and visits her dad’s psychic healer for a prescription for prescience. Fantetti’s story is a darkly hilarious, tender chronicle of family, destiny and resilience.
