Emmett de Monterey

Vivid, engaging... this insightful memoir sheds light on the author's life as a disabled gay man who is often rendered invisible

A frank and intimate memoir written with an incredible clear-eyed intensity

The magic of Emmett De Monterey's book is its disarming accessibility. Compulsive reading, unique, this beautifully crafted work is suffused with depth, affection, and remarkable observations. De Monterey is a profoundly gifted writer.

Exploring the reality of growing up gay and disabled in 1980s London, this beautiful memoir is as uplifting as it is devastating, and as funny and wise as it is profound.

Astonishing, illuminating and enriching.

There is a tension, brilliantly evoked throughout, in the paradoxically hyper-visible but invisible disabled body and how it relates to notions of being "out".

When Emmett de Monterey is eighteen months old, a doctor diagnoses him with cerebral palsy. Words too big for his 25-year-old artist parents and their happy, smiling baby. Growing up in South East London in the 1980s, Emmett is spat at on the street and prayed over at church. At his school for disabled children, he's told he will be expelled if the rumours are true, if he's gay; at his mainstream school, teachers refuse to schedule his classes on the ground floor, and he loses a stone from the effort of getting up the stairs. At ten years old, Emmett is chosen for a first-of-its-kind surgery in America that will 'cure' him, enable him to walk unaided. BBC cameras follow him to a hospital in Connecticut and newspapers talk of miracles. Despite himself, Emmett hopes for a miracle too: to walk, to dance, to not be nervous in wet weather. To have a body that's everyday beautiful, to hold hands in the street. To not be gay, which he believes is another word for loneliness. When the 'miracle' doesn't occur, Emmett must reckon with a world which views disabled people as invisible, unworthy of desire. He must fight to be seen.

Go the Way Your Blood Beats

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Emmett de Monterey

Praise for Go the Way Your Blood Beats

Vivid, engaging... this insightful memoir sheds light on the author's life as a disabled gay man who is often rendered invisible

A frank and intimate memoir written with an incredible clear-eyed intensity

The magic of Emmett De Monterey's book is its disarming accessibility. Compulsive reading, unique, this beautifully crafted work is suffused with depth, affection, and remarkable observations. De Monterey is a pr ...

Vivid, engaging... this insightful memoir sheds light on the author's life as a disabled gay man who is often rendered invisible

A frank and intimate memoir written with an incredible clear-eyed intensity

The magic of Emmett De Monterey's book is its disarming accessibility. Compulsive reading, unique, this beautifully crafted work is suffused with depth, affection, and remarkable observations. De Monterey is a pr ...

Vivid, engaging... this insightful memoir sheds light on the author's life as a disabled gay man who is often rendered invisible

A frank and intimate memoir written with an incredible clear-eyed intensity

The magic of Emmett De Monterey's book is its disarming accessibility. Compulsive reading, unique, this beautifully crafted work is suffused with depth, affection, and remarkable observations. De Monterey is a pr ...

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