The Little Locksmith
Strapped to a board for ten years of childhood, she emerged determined to build a life nobody thought she was owed.
Diagnosed with spinal tuberculosis at five, Katharine Butler Hathaway spent a decade strapped motionless to a board, and emerged an adult with a curved spine and no expectation of an ordinary life. Instead she bought a house in Castine, Maine, made it beautiful, went to Paris, married, and wrote this account of doing so. Published in 1943 and out of print for decades before its rediscovery, it is a memoir about refusing the identity assigned to a disabled woman by everyone around her.
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Elizabeth Gilbert
Despite being literally tied down for all of childhood and in pain for all of adulthood, Hathaway lived a grand, artistic, and even sensual existence.
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