Waist High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled.

• Author: Wolfe, Kathi

by Nancy Mairs Beacon Press. 224 Pages. $20.00.

One day, a friend called author Nancy Mairs and asked, "How are you?" When she said, "Just fine, " her friend wondered, "How can you say that?" To this, Mairs, who has multiple sclerosis, responded with a laugh: "I don't know, Barrie. I guess it must be true."

Another time, a taxi driver told Mairs that she shouldn't be out riding in a cab, but home where people like her belonged.

These are just two of the pointed stories Mairs tells about having M.S. in her new collection of essays, Waist High in the World.

The author--who has written about literature, feminism, and Roman Catholicism in Ordinary Time, Carnal Acts, and other books--brings intelligence, wit, and personal experience to her work.

Mairs wants to change attitudes toward the disabled by bringing the reader into the world of someone who has a disability. To do this, she writes about her own life. We learn what it's like to need help with such intimate tasks as dressing and how frustrating it is not to be able to get into an inaccessible restroom.

When her husband George is diagnosed with cancer, Mairs expresses her fears about what will happen to her after his death. (Who will care for me? she asks herself. Will I be too much of a burden on my family or society?)

We see things from her point of view--sitting in a wheelchair--where you gaze into everyone's navel and no one notices you're there.

Mairs tells of the time she and George went to a luncheon honoring the Dalai Lama. They became caught in a crush of people--none of whom paid any attention to the fact that Mairs was in a wheelchair. She writes, "No matter how persuaded they were of the beauty and sacredness of all life, not one of them seemed to think that any life was going on below the level of his or her gaze. `Down here!' I kept whimpering at the hips and buttocks and bellies pressing my wheelchair on all sides. `Down here! There's a person down here!' My only recourse was to roll to one side and hug a wall."

Mairs isn't auditioning to be on Oprah. She's not telling these stories to inspire people or induce our pity. The author is coming out from behind the curtain to make visible the experience of being disabled in America.

Mairs knows that no demonstration, government report, or law will by itself transform America's attitude and treatment of disabled people, unless people understand what it means to be disabled.

She wisely doesn't claim to represent any disability group...