Featured Writer #126: Brian Trapp

Brain Trapp’s Range of Motion is as rip-roaring in pace and humor as it is in its tenderness. The novel follows twin brothers Michael and Sal and their mother and father as they navigate Sal’s cerebral palsy and associated individual and familial challenges. Soaring across adolescence to the cusp of adulthood of Michael and Sal’s life, Range of Motion observes its characters in their most vulnerable, a testament to familial connection and sacrifice amidst medical and financial hardship. Yet, Range of Motion’s heavy-hearted explorations do not arrive at the expense of entertainment value: the novel’s situational humor and hilarious dialogue often read nearly as family sitcom, in which each character’s personalities are on full display as they navigate the separate and conjoined journeys on which the embark.  

American media often outright ignores or make stereotypical caricatures of individuals with physical and intellectual disabilities; I think of canonized novels like Flowers for Algernon and Of Mice and Men and films like Forest Gump and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape as examples our culture has pedestaled under the blanket of “Disabilities Representation,” each to varying degrees of harm. Trapp, however, is uniquely positioned to approach writing disabled characters and stories with the nuance, honesty, and heart missing from much of our culture’s canonized examples due to his experience growing up with Danny, his twin brother who had cerebral palsy, and his critical expertise in the field of Disability Studies.  

While much of the previous work I’ve encountered centering on characters with disabilities presumes to understand what its characters are thinking, in Range of Motion, Trapp gracefully and critically takes another approach. As Trapp articulates in the following interview, “[t]he greatest question of my life is: ‘What was my brother thinking?’ I didn’t want to falsely try to solve that mystery with narrative. Instead, I wanted to write more deeply into the problem.”Instead of presuming unbridled access to Sal’s interiority, Trapp makes the problem of interior access his theme.

By Range of Motion’s conclusion, the reader is invited to experience Sal’s family’s interiority, an advantage great novels are uniquely positioned to offer. Trapp eschews, as previously stated, the temptation to “solve that mystery with narrative,” to venture to speak for Sal, in favor of the delicate work of demonstrating the most difficult and tender moments of supporting a family member whose feelings are not always readily accessible through spoken language. Balancing levity with an awareness of the humane struggles (and victories) such families encounter is one of the many successes of Range of Motion, a list of successes that will grow as more readers enjoy and learn from this book.

Ninth Letter is proud to present an excerpt from the novel, followed by a fantastic interview with the author.

—Nathan Metz

Nathan Metz (NM): Brian, I am so grateful for the opportunity to read this humorous yet tender novel. The novel largely follows the maturation of twin brothers: Sal, who had cerebral palsy, and Michael, who discerns unique life perspectives from his experience growing up beside Sal. I understand this is inspired by your own life and twin brother Danny. How did you navigate the line between experience and fictitious rendering? How did you negotiate both the ethical and creative questions surrounding writing about others’ lives?

Brian Trapp (BT): Thanks for the kind words. I think of memory as the trampoline I jump off of in my fiction. I’ve tried to write fiction untethered to my personal experience, but I’m not very good at it. So far, I need to be anchored in memory to write interesting work. Part of this is because my unique personal experience is the news I have to offer the world: my twin brother had cerebral palsy, intellectual disabilities, and communication disabilities, and he was also funny, engaging, and complex. So it’s part of my life’s mission to realistically render that experience, to make a character like my twin a compelling figure worthy of attention and respect.

But I also believe in fiction’s unique power as an artform: it lets you lean into emotional and dramatic truth, to write beyond what “literally happened” to tell a deeper truth. It lets you “presume” to be another person (as Zadie Smith says) and dramatize another consciousness, not just tell your own story but integrate other people’s experiences, so that you can tell a more communal story. Ultimately, I think fiction allows me to be more ethical in writing about other lives because I’m not exposing my family members to the kind of scrutiny that a memoir would. The characters were initially based on my real-life family but they escaped their molds and became their own people.

The ethical and creative questions were often intertwined, especially in representing Sal. I struggled deeply with how to represent someone like my twin brother on the page. Do I enter into that character’s head? We have a fraught history of able-bodied authors presuming to enter the minds of the intellectually disabled in such novels like Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (which I make fun of in ROM) and Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon. My friend and fellow writer George Estreich wrote about Keyes’ book and representing intellectual disability in The Writer’s Chronicle last fall. He writes that true belonging for people with intellectual disabilities “hinges on respect for unknowability, on the understanding that we are at least partly mysterious to one another.” In other words, respecting what you don’t know about someone is also part of treating them as fully human. The greatest question of my life is: What was my brother thinking? I didn’t want to falsely try to solve that mystery with narrative. Instead, I wanted to write more deeply into the problem. So for the vast majority of the book, we are only in Michael’s and the parents’ points of view, and they desperately want to know what Sal is thinking.

(NM): Humor and tenderness: these are the two notions I brought up in the first question, and I wanted to ask you about their relationship in the book. How do you feel humor and tenderness inform one another in Range of Motion or in contemporary literature at large?

(BT): This is an interesting question because most people would assume that humor and tenderness are naturally opposed. Some types of humor rely on distance or even cruelty. But my favorite kinds of comedy embrace tenderness and pathos or are in a dynamic relationship with them. My teacher at the University of Cincinnati, Chris Bachelder, would paraphrase his teacher Padgett Powell, who was paraphrasing his teacher Donald Barthelme: “The wacky mode must also break their hearts.” What I think they mean is that when humor is employed in a fictional narrative, to work to its most artful effect, it shouldn’t just be merely funny. It needs to float above the ballast of pathos, of real emotional stakes. And humor often works in a dynamic relationship with pathos. Comedies are also often about the failure of comedy, in that the comic tone will drop away and heartbreak or tenderness will burst through, before the tone rises back up again. I think that’s true with the comic novels I love, especially the ones about disability, which are often confronting deep human vulnerability: Stanley Elkin’s The Magic Kingdom, Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows, and Akhil Sharma’s Family Life.

In Range of Motion, I’m employing a comic tone but the characters are often in vulnerable situations. Sal gets several surgeries or has medical scares. Hannah is trying to navigate Sal through the difficult medical and education systems. Gabe is attempting to be a good father while also under relentless financial pressure. Michael is trying to give Sal a voice in the world and often failing. Humor is employed by the characters as a self-defense mechanism. But I also wanted the tone to incorporate moments of pathos or tenderness as well, in which the tone drops into sincerity or the pathos breaks through. Sal is playful and gives his family crap but he’s also physically vulnerable and requires a level of intimacy that allows for tenderness.

(NM): I recall, speaking of tenderness, a moment early in the novel where, upon learning of infant Sal’s brain-bleed which causes his cerebral palsy, Hannah [Sal’s mother] asks herself the question: Can I give enough? The weight around the question is palpable, and each character in the novel seems to grapple with this question in some form. Can you speak a bit to the question’s resonances in the novel, and in caring for children with disabilities in the real world?

(BT): Hannah and Gabe think about it in terms of being special needs parents, and maybe just parents in general, but also in a long-term marriage. Michael asks this question of himself in relation to caring for his twin. Can I give enough? Can you give enough to the people around you while still maintaining your sense of self?

Sal also asks himself this question. It speaks to another part of the book, when Hannah’s friend says about her own disabled daughter: “You know, they just see how much Tina takes. They don’t see how much she gives back.” That was actually something one of my mom’s friends said to her about my brother. She saw how Danny didn’t just receive care but also gave it back. So I wanted my book to dramatize all the ways Sal is giving enough to his family, that it’s not a one-way street of care-giver and care-taker. Part of Sal’s giving is releasing his desire for control. But part of the drama of the novel is him reaching his limit: I wanted to show him getting fed up, all the subtle and unsubtle ways he finds to re-establish his sense of agency, including his big escape from Camp Cheerful at the novel’s beginning.

As far as caring for children with disabilities in the real world, I think this is the question that faces every special needs parent. My mom often heard this from her friends when they considered what her life was like: “I can’t imagine.” What they meant was that they couldn’t imagine giving that much. It made them question their notions of independence and autonomy. But they also saw the extreme effort that it takes to navigate ableist systems: inaccessible public spaces, the education system, the medical system. We ask our special needs families to give too much rather than changing how our systems work.

The bigger question is why does the United States, the richest country in the world, ask our special needs parents to give so much? They shouldn’t need to give that much. We should support these families with better resources, better social services, better health care, and better social connection. We shouldn’t require them to be heroes.

(NM): The voice throughout this novel is enchanting: the plot’s swift unfolding from conflict to conflict feels rendered so thoughtfully in the bouncy, quick-turning prose sustained by the equally bouncy voice. Young writers are always wondering “Where do I find my voice?” Where did you? Was your voice found, developed, or neither?

(BT): Some writers have a distinct voice and are utterly themselves no matter what they write (like Stanley Elkin). And some writers are more chameleons and might adopt a different voice for each project. I probably belong to the former group. I developed my voice through a long, fumbling practice. I was interested in how I could be dynamic with my voice, balance humor and pathos, how it could be funny and sad or tender at the same time. Growing up, I often found that I wasn’t the funniest person in a room, but I was good at being funny in situations where people didn’t expect humor. Part of finding my voice was letting this authentic aspect of myself develop in an artful way.

When I began trying to write about this material, I wrote about the camp when the boys were eighteen. I wrote it in a breezy first-person voice but it felt overly simple or false. My narrator was so desperate to be liked. I stalled on that draft and didn’t know where to go. As a creative exercise, I started writing in close third or free-indirect style when the boys were younger, and I discovered a much sharper, more dynamic voice. I was reading these tonally complex third-person close novels: Deb Olin Unferth’s Vacation and Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge. I started paying close attention to my sentences and how they might turn, as you said. I entered the heads of the parents, writing the scene of their mother, Hannah, pushing her babies in a stroller, and then I jumped a few years later to their father, Gabe, building a ramp into their home. I wrote the story of Michael and Sal at age five, trick-or-treating after Sal’s first surgery, where Michael thinks he can hear Sal speak but becomes increasingly doubtful as the story goes on. This became “Michael and Sal,” published in Ninth Letter 10.1 in 2013 (with wonderful illustrations and design). But it felt like a real breakthrough in finding the kind of voice I needed to tell this particular story: one that could walk a tightrope and welcome in the absurdity and tenderness, the anger and silliness, the joy and heartbreak, and dance with it all. Still, it took a long time to figure out how to hone the voice to tell this story on a large novel-sized scale.

So I think your voice is both found and developed. It is often already part of your personality but needs to be honed through continual effort until it feels right to you. And you might need to find it again for each book.

(NM): Though pulling from aspects of your life and research, embarking on a novel seems rife with surprises that occur only during the writing process. Now that the novel is complete and out in the world, what surprised you about the finished novel? In what minor or major ways did it turn out differently than the original plan you made out for yourself?

(BT): When I embarked on the novel, I thought it would mostly be about Camp Cheerful, when the brothers are eighteen. But then I kept getting sucked back in time, and part of the reason why it took so long is because I was trying to balance these two parts: the camp sections and the more episodic coming-of age sections. In editing, we ended up cutting most of the camp (about 100 pages) so that only about fifty pages remain. It’s condensed down to a finely crafted diamond of material, establishing the brother’s deep relationship at the beginning of the novel, before Sal escapes camp in his powerchair. Even though it was painful to cut so much material that I suffered over, it’s surprising that I don’t care. It’s still the story I wanted to tell. For years, I was so wedded to invoking the magic of the camp. But in the end, I needed to think about what my reader’s experience through the arc of the book was, and most of that camp material wasn’t needed.

What I would’ve thought was essential to the book ended up not being that important. The exact plot of the novel was less important than dramatizing the brothers’ overall relationship. This might be weird to say but it always felt like the story existed outside of myself and I was just the flawed vessel chosen to write it. I worked on it for so many years, with so many stops and starts, that there were days when I wasn’t sure it would be in the world at all. But there was a small but nagging belief that no matter how many mistakes I made, if I just kept going, I would eventually get it right.

Brian Trapp is director of disability studies at the University of Oregon, where he also teaches fiction and nonfiction. His work has been published in the Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Longreads, Brevity, and elsewhere. His essays have been listed as Notable in Best American Essays and anthologized in the Best of Brevity.

He has received a Steinbeck Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, an Oregon Arts Fellowship, a Sewanee Writer’s Conference Borchardt Scholarship, a Tin House Summer Residency, and a Taft Fellowship from the University of Cincinnati, where he completed his PhD. He grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, with his twin brother, Danny.