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medicine in literature BOOK CLUB

GRACE WILLIAMS SAYS IT LOUD
by Emma Henderson
SCEPTRE

Summary
Aged 11, Grace Williams, mentally bright as a button but severally
physically disabled, is sent to live in The Briar, a 1950s residential
institution where most of the staff consider physical and mental disability
to be the same thing, and where the endemic attitude to the children is
that ‘they’re animals’. The lively, dancing style in which Grace Williams tells
her own story makes it clear, however, that she is talented and intelligent, and no matter who stands
in her way, she will live life to the full.
Grace misses her mother’s care and suffers from the occasional sadism of staff members, but
she also makes a friend: quirky, gifted Daniel Smith, who is epileptic and has lost both arms in a
car crash. And he has a raffish, loving father, an antiques dealer who eventually arranges for the
two of them to have a romantic escape. Ordinary days at The Briar have nightmarish aspects but
also comforts: the workshops, the occasional celebrations, and most of all the growing love affair
between Grace and Daniel, which soon becomes sexual.
Grace Williams Says it Loud educates us about the impossibility of defining people by their
disability through its moving and inspiring portrait of its central character. Emma Henderson
challenges her readers to understand that Grace Williams is every bit as alive and deserving of fun,
freedom and respect as they are.

About the author

Emma Henderson grew up and currently lives in London. She spent several years working in France running
a ski chalet, before returning in 2005 to focus on writing. She gained an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck in
2006 and was a finalist in the 2007 Asham Award, the women-only short story competition set up in memory
of Virginia Woolf. Grace Williams Says it Loud is her first novel.

www.wellcomebookprize.org
 Questions
• In interviews, Emma Henderson has said that this, her first novel, is in part an attempt to give a voice to
her own sister, Clare Williams, who was sent to a mental institution in 1957. Nevertheless, how difficult is it
for a writer to imagine a character with a disability? Is Grace Williams convincing?
• Does Grace’s lively, dancing voice stop us thinking of her as ‘just’ disabled? Do the rhythms and
changes of direction reflect her condition?
• What did you make of her friend Daniel as a character? Is his moneyed, loving, eccentric father, Mr
Smith the antiques dealer, too good to be true – or must he be like that to give Dan, and in turn Grace, any
chance in the purgatory of The Briar?
• Did you believe in the love between Grace and Dan? Is the sex well handled?
• What did you feel about the way the sexual abuse of the children is portrayed? Is this a hard subject for
writers to deal with?
• What did you feel about Grace’s optimism and refusal to blame? Did you ever think she might sometimes
have been angrier?
• Although we are constantly (albeit gently) reminded that the novel takes place in a mental institution,
Grace’s lively, hopeful and forgiving voice allows us in equal measure to forget that she is disabled. Of
course, this is a unique trick that only a novel can do. Could this book be made into a movie, without
radically changing it?

Passage
From ‘1957’ (p. 37):
There weren’t many mirrors at the Briar. But here was Daniel, skewing his body, turning his head from left
to right. He kept his gaze on me, and when his head steadied, and our eyes swiveled, met and focused,
I saw dozens of reflections in Daniel’s eyes, including dozens of different me’s. Daniel’s inky-black pupils
were enormous in the shadow of the cedar tree, but they still shone, and the thin bands of greenish-grey
around them made them look like the pictures of planets in my brother John’s Encyclopedia Britannica.
‘Beautiful hair. And with a name to match. I know now you’re Grace. I asked Matron. Grace Williams.’
Daniel lifted the newspaper and put it on my lap. I stared at it.
‘Grace,’ Daniel urged, putting his nose right up to mine. ‘Tell me. Can you read? Can you tell the time?’
Why was it important? I put my thumb on my nose, which was cold, and then on Daniel’s.
Thumbelina dance, Thumbelina sing. Thumbelina, what’s the difference if you’re very small?
I was very small when I sat on my father’s lap in the warmth of his study. We listened to music, and I heard
Father’s heart, my heart and the music tapping into them. We listened so much, but never enough.
‘More, more!’
Never enough, but we sang along. And when it was time for me to go, when Mother knocked on the door,
or John called us to come down for tea, Father picked me up. He balanced me carefully while he bent
over the radiogram to turn it off, and I saw the record, black and shiny, like brylcreemed hair. The records
looked the same, but Father showed me how each one had a different name.

Further reading
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (2003).
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960).
The Divided Self: An existential study in sanity and madness by R D Laing (1960).
A Hospital Odyssey by Gwyneth Lewis (2010).

www.wellcomebookprize.org
The Wellcome Trust is a global charitable foundation dedicated to achieving extraordinary improvements in health by supporting the brightest minds.
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