Mother Tongue: A Memoir

This stirring account from novelist and translator Nović (True Biz) explores the fraught intersections of deaf identity, eugenics, and the adoption process. After slowly losing her hearing as a child and failing a school-mandated hearing test at age 12, Nović concealed her disability by “reading books and reading lips and staying quiet.” From that personal entry point, she widens her lens to examine the long history of discrimination against deaf and disabled communities, including prejudices within deaf institutions, where whiteness, patriarchy, and ableism have often replicated broader American power structures. Nović traces contemporary injustices—such as the denial of interpreters, Miranda rights, and basic protections to deaf people in encounters with police—back to their historical roots, from Alexander Graham Bell’s suppression of sign language in the name of preserving so-called “Americanness” to Nazi Germany’s eugenics programs. Particularly strong are the chapters on adoption, which detail both the bureaucratic barriers and inner conflicts that Nović, a white woman, experienced while attempting to adopt her brown deaf son. Lucid and rigorously researched, Nović’s memoir offers a powerful critique of the systems that have marginalized deaf Americans across the decades. It’s a sobering must-read. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (May)