Publisher's Synopsis
In her memoir, Holly Elliott relates the painful but ultimately triumphant experiences that led her to take up a new career in rehabilitation counseling for the deaf at mid-life. Born in 1920, she had an unusual education in all the ports of call to which her father, a chaplain in the U.S. Navy, was assigned: San Diego, Guam, Shanghai, and Goat Island, San Francisco Bay. Eventually she matriculated at College of the Pacific as a music major, but a brutally negative assessment of her declining ability to hear put her into an emotional crisis, and she transferred to UCLA to complete the major. Deciding that she would be able to function anyway (""Who says I'm deaf?"" was a constant refrain she said to herself throughout adolescence and young adulthood), Holly married in 1944 and embarked on a twenty-five-year role as wife of a small-town country doctor, mother of three boys, and community activist. Then, around 1968, several things combined to move her into her new career. Her hearing had become so abysmal that no amount of covering would completely disguise it, her sons had all left home for college, and her husband died. As she relates, her minister friend told her about this time, ""Why don't you stop fighting the deafness and use it?"" and this galvanized her into returning to college for an MA in Social Rehabilitation--a degree which included learning sign language and which she received at the age of 50. A twenty-five-year career as one of the first therapists for the deaf who was deaf herself ensued, a career full of local and national honors and appreciation from groups as diverse as the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to the Association of Late Deafened Adults (ALDA). Holly structures her memoir by keying her recollections to her ""bulging life file."" She has been moved by a client who asks her to ""teach me how to love myself."" As she goes back through the material contained in the file, she relates how each one successively relates to her re-education. She begins by recalling her childhood and the years as wife-mother, quickly moving to the crisis years of the late 60s. She details the confusion and doubt as she returned to a college campus feeling out-of-place in any number of ways. Then comes professional notice as she is selected for her fieldwork by a progressive organization that advocates ""total communication"" in dealing with deaf children, especially. She relates the challenging yet humorous experience of therapy training. Finally, she gives a glance back over these productive years to assess the advances in the field of rehabilitation of the deaf in the latter decades of the twentieth century. What Holly Elliott's memoir sensitively details are the myriad confusions and misapprehensions that the hearing world has about deaf culture, and vice versa. She inhabited both worlds, and eventually learned to advocate for cooperation between the two: she devoted herself to ""building bridges,"" as one of her citations put it. Inhabiting and finding comfort and security in this space in-between these worlds was difficult, and one of the primary achievements of this memoir are the courageous and perceptive ways Holly transformed what she initially thought a significant physical defect into a means to effect original, significant and compassionate changes in social attitudes.
