This is not a redemption narrative,” Patricia Horvath writes in her memoir about a childhood and adolescence marked by her painful struggles with scoliosis. Yet considering what she’s overcome, it’s hard not to think Horvath, in no small measure, has moved from darkness into light. In “All The Difference,” Horvath, who teaches English and creative writing at Framingham State University, examines what for most kids and teens can be one of the most difficult things to contend with: feeling or looking different. It began in her childhood, with a curved spine that made her unbalanced, awkward and a failure at sports and schoolyard games. “My lack of coordination,” she writes, “was on display every single day.” Yet things got worse as Horvath moved into adolescence. After physical therapy and special orthopedic shoes failed to address her problems, she was forced to wear a bulky, corseted brace 23 hours a day starting at age 13. A few years later, she had spinal fusion surgery, leaving her bedridden for months in plaster and fiberglass casts; she had to relearn to walk afterward. Then, years later, when she was living in Northampton and pursuing an MFA in creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Horvath discovered she was actually shrinking; though her doctors doubted her fears at first, she was in fact now struggling with osteoporosis. That condition might have come about from years of skimpy eating, she writes, her way of trying to divorce herself from her own body. “My bones have always been treacherous, and once again they had betrayed me.” But “All the Difference,” despite the pain it recounts, is never self-pitying, and it’s much more than a litany of medical problems. Horvath looks back at other landmarks from her youth — a mean-spirited elementary school teacher, an icy relationship with her stepfather, listening to rock and roll, her first tentative relationships with boys — with a sharp eye and often a dry sense of humor. In elementary school, for instance, she developed a love of the tales of the Greek Gods; they become a reference point for describing the special shoes she had to wear to correct her imbalanced walk. “They were heavy things, nothing like Hermes’s winged sandals. They made me feel earthbound, and I loathed them.” And Horvath’s physical problems, if nothing else, cemented her love of reading and writing at an early age, an interest she’s now made good on. She’s published short stories and essays in numerous publications, won a number of awards and fellowships, and today is an editor of “The Massachusetts Review.” Ultimately, she says, “All the Difference” is an exploration of the connection between disability and self-identity and what happens to one’s sense of self when a physical disability ceases to be visible. “You have the bones of a seventy year old, my doctor has said,” she writes. “Yet they support me, these geriatric bones. In their own crooked way, and despite my neglect, they hold me up. They are, in no small sense, miraculous.” —The Daily Hampshire Gazette, Thursday, May 11, 2017
Imagine being a 13-year-old in the hands of a “large, stubble-faced man who was smoking a cigar. [ . . . ] a man who would spread his tobacco-stained fingers on my torso, breathe his sour breath into my face.” Sounds like a child about to undergo a nasty ordeal. Though it’s not what you may be thinking, Patricia Horvath did, in fact, experience this ordeal after being diagnosed with scoliosis, “a double, S-shaped curvature of the spine.”In the above scenario, she’s being fitted for a brace. He “wrapped my torso in gauze then strapped my head into a sling. He hoisted me up with a pulley until I was hanging by my chin, my toes barely touching the grimy floor.” Horvath, in her forthcoming memoir, All the Difference, powerfully portrays the challenges her disability imposed. The impetus for writing these experiences came at the urging of Horvath’s writing group after she shared a story she was working on. Though that particular story wasn’t published, she’s had numerous other stories and essays appear in literary magazines and anthologies. These days, she teaches creative writing and literature at Massachusetts’ Framingham State University, and she’s an editor at The Massachusetts Review. But when Horvath was in sixth grade, she was “shy, uncoordinated, a socially awkward girl [ . . . ].” She states, “my lack of coordination was on display every single day. I felt this distinction keenly [ . . . ] during the annual Presidential Fitness Test.” Lyndon Johnson was President then, followed by Richard Nixon. “I couldn’t picture either of them [ . . . ] mastering even a single cartwheel, let alone the entire test.” Horvath found her solace in books, and spent weekends and school holidays reading in her room. Even after her scoliosis finding, she kept growing taller, gaining two inches between grades seven and eight. It was then she met the aforementioned brace. By the time she was 15, spinal fusion surgery was in order, followed by a plaster cast. “Layer after layer was smoothed onto my back, neck, and thigh. I could not see anything, but could hear the slap of bandages, feel them hardening to a crust. [ . . . ] bit by bit I was entombed.” Her final cast was a lightweight fiberglass one she wore for three months: “For the first time in nearly three years my head and neck were free. I could not yet move them, nor sit up, but I stared at my neck in the hand mirror, imagining how it would look adorned with necklaces, silk scarves, [ . . . ].” Throughout Horvath’s years of pain, confusion, embarrassment, and taunting by other children, the one constant was her mother Maureen, whose unrelenting compassion stands out in the book. Horvath’s father was frequently absent. Her mother’s second husband was domineering. But all was not gloomy during Horvath’s teen years. She learned to smoke pot and drink homemade wine at a friend’s house. While recuperating from spinal fusion surgery, she met a boy who was hospitalized for stomach surgery. They struck up a friendship that lasted on and off for years. When Horvath went off to college, and after years of their lives being “so entwined,” Maureen had a hard time with the separation. Horvath writes that her mother assumed they’d live under the same roof: “I’d be the companion who compensated for her bad marriage even as I was part of the reason for it.” Note that this memoir is dedicated to her mother. I was quite taken with All the Difference and found it hard to put down. But I kept looking for dates or even years to be identified so I’d have a better timeline on what happened when. I did get occasional clues along the way: who was President at the time; a reference to Twiggy, a teen-aged model in the 1960s; and mention of Peter Frampton’s song, “Baby, I Love Your Way,” from 1975. In a chapter near the end of her memoir, she asks herself a question that keeps readers thinking: “What am I now? Formerly disabled? Healed? Reformed? (Literally, yes, I suppose this is so; I have been re-formed, [ . . . ] No one points, stares, yet I still can’t shake the feeling that I’m ‘passing’ for able-bodied.” Today, as part of her curriculum at Framingham, Horvath teaches a course titled Disability in Literature and Culture and finds time to give readings at numerous venues. Additionally, as she wrapped up writing All the Difference, she was preparing for a charity walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and back again. My thought is that she may lay to rest her feeling of “passing,” and instead, keep giving us more of her remarkable, compelling writing.—New Pages, by Valerie Wieland, June 01, 2017
This beautifully written, thoughtful memoir by a writer whose fiction has appeared in several issues of Confrontation, focuses on Horvath’s adolescence and specifically on her physical abnormality since childhood—caused by scoliosis—which eventually sends her, at thirteen, to Yale UniversityHospital in New Haven, Connecticut, where her spinal column was fused and bones were grafted (her bones had always betrayed her, she writes). A nearly year’s-long hospital confinement in two different body casts followed, during which she could move only one leg (a bit) and raise her arms, from a prone position, straight above her head. The head itself could not be moved. This would be a dreadful thing for anyone to endure, but one might think it would permanently warp an adolescent girl’s body image (given the extreme self-consciousness about all aspects of the female body at that age) and in addition severely impair her social life and psychological development, and thus have long-lasting negative impacts on her future. None of this happens, quite remarkably (though there were consequences, as the allusion to Robert Frost in the memoir’s title suggests). Remarkably, too, there is not a sentence in Horvath’s book that hints of self-pity or lashes out at a fate or a God for the injustice and pain of her circumstances. Though she was never a popular girl—her physical ineptitude, her inability from a young age to do many of the things other children did, assuring her “outsideness,” her Otherness—her small circle of friends nonetheless stuck with her even when she could not give much back. Naturally she couldn’t attend school for some period; luckily, she had always been an “indoors” girl, a lover of books. Her mother, during Horvath’s prolonged experience of helplessness and patience (what else was there to do but wait?) is a constant and nurturing presence in the memoir. The experiences she had as an adolescent also seem to have given her a wisdom most people learn only later. Here, Horvath captures what visitors to patients in hospitals feel: “. . . the anxiety and helplessness of seeing a loved one suffer—seeing, by extension, themselves. . . . The patient is a powerful mirror. There’s nothing like a hospital to make someone, even a teenager, aware of mortality. The visitor thinks, There but for the grace of God, yet knows that this is false. There but for the time being. The relief of walking away, through the revolving doors and into the cold night air, comes as a shock. Years later, visiting a friend with AIDS, I would go straight from hospital to restaurant, to binge on sushi and martinis.” In a few sentences: death waiting in the wings for all of us, and the stubborn resilience of the living. Horvath’s short memoir is full of pleasures of this kind.—Confrontation, Jonna Semeiks, Spring 2017
Patricia Horvath, who teaches at Framingham State Universityand is an editor at the Massachusetts Review, has an S-shaped spine caused by severe scoliosis that couldn’t be helped by physical therapy or a torso-length brace. As a teenager, she underwent spinal surgery, bone grafts, and had metal rods placed in her back; she spent months immobilized in a cast. In All the Difference (Etruscan), Horvath recounts this difficult time of wrestling both with medical challenges and adolescence. It is a graceful story not of overcoming challenge, but of accepting it. The Boston Globe, Nina MacLaughlin, July 28, 2017
