Book club had its November meeting on November 18th and we are skipping December so we won’t meet again until January 2026. On November 18th the book club had Claudia Marseille (author of “But You Look So Normal: Lost and Found In A Hearing World”) and Rachel Zemach (author of “The Butterfly Cage”) for our November 18th HLAA-TC Zoom Book Club. The following is a detailed summary with links discussed.
[Note: Originally we planned to record and place the recorded moderated discussion between Rachel Zemach and Claudia Marseille on our YouTube channel but unfortunately it didn’t record successfully (user error). Thank you to both Rachel and Claudia for taking part in this special book club, even though it didn’t record the discussion was great]
- “But You Look So Normal: Lost and Found In A Hearing World” By Claudia Marseille (you can find her book on: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop, Simon & Schuster, Audiobook on Amplify)
- “The Butterfly Cage” By Rachel Zemach (you can find her book: on Amazon and Bookshop)
- Claudia and Rachel have similar family background (Jewish, however not raised religious; and both have spent a large portion of their lives in California; both had intelligent and complicated fathers).
- Claudia was diagnosed as severely hard of hearing at age 4 but was mainstreamed in public schools instead of attending a school for the deaf. She wrote “But You Look So Normal” to reflect on her life’s influences and share her story with friends experiencing age-related hearing loss.
- Rachel became deaf at age 10 after a fall, retaining 5% hearing in one ear and using a hearing aid. She taught deaf children for 10 years before writing “Butterfly Cage” to process her trauma and advocate for deaf children.
- Both authors described feeling in-between the hearing and deaf worlds, with Claudia more in the hearing world and Rachel balancing both.
- Other resources on in-betweeners:
- Technology has improved things (closed captions, transcription, video chatting/conferences, etc.) but in the advent of all the tech it requires those of us with hearing loss to have to really advocate for ourselves, especially since hearing loss is an invisible disability. More on invisible disability:
- This blog is on advocating for yourself with your hearing loss
- This website talks about invisible/hidden disability project called the Sunflower Lanyard program).
- Rachel shared some statistics on the large number of people with hearing loss versus deaf in this country. For similar statistics, see this page on the National Institute on Deafness website).
- Claudia and Rachel discussed the challenges of being hard of hearing, with Rachel emphasizing the importance of sign language and multi-modal communication for parents of deaf children. They shared personal experiences of social isolation.
- There was much discussion about deafness education and sign language and Rachel shared many insights of her time teaching (make sure to read Rachel’s book for more).
- Rachel also shared that the Lingvano app is a good tool to help people learn ASL.
- Books that were discussed by the authors and recommended were:
- ”Shouting Won’t Help” By Katherine Bouton (read by this book club in August 2021 and we had Katherine as a guest. She is president of HLAA-NYC and they have virtual meetings with great presentations. She also has a blog).
- ‘Hear & Beyond” By Shari Eberts and Gael Hannon. We had Shari as a HLAA-TC Chapter Presentation speaker several years ago.
- Rachel Zemach is writing a second book about “In-betweeners”, those who straddle both deaf and hearing worlds. [publishing date to be determined]
- ”Hear Today, Gone Tomorrow: A True Story of Love, Hearing Loss, Heartbreak and Redemption” by John Geoghegan. – Rachel recommended this after book club had ended and wanted to make sure attendees got this recommendation.
- A reading order for 2026 has yet to be decided (that will be announced on this blog/email and our book club page)
