With new novel, author writes his disabled brother into literature

Michael and Sal are twins. So are Brian and Danny. Sal has cerebral palsy. So did Danny. 

But Michael and Sal aren’t real. They’re fictional characters written by Brian Trapp in his debut novel, “Range of Motion.” The book was heavily inspired by Trapp growing up with Danny, a brother who was so much like him save for the quirk of biology that split their paths.

The chronology starts with the brothers as infants and ends with Sal entering a long-term care home as Michael heads to college. The Trapp brothers’ story, though, kept going. Danny died when the two brothers were 28 years old.

Trapp, now 42, is the head of both the Disability Studies program and the Kidd Creative Writing Workshops at the University of Oregon. He said he wrote the novel with two ideas in mind: He wasn’t going to write a tragedy, and Sal would be as complex as any other character. 

The book, importantly, is also funny. The family’s day-to-day life features off-color jokes. Michael sings a song while showering Sal about “just washin’ my brother’s penis.” Sal has a call-and-response exchange with their dad to call Michael ugly. The story also has earnest, tangly emotion to round out the authentic feeling of being a family with a child with intellectual disabilities.

Trapp has written nonfiction and personal essays about his life with Danny, the virality of one leading to the book deal for “Range of Motion.” He said this book has been decades in the making.

“I think I’ve always been trying to write this novel,” he said.

Fictionalizing real life, without overstepping

The book wasn’t always about two twin brothers. In 2009, Trapp started writing a novel about Camp Cheerful, a camp in Strongsville, Ohio, for campers with disabilities, where Trapp worked as a counselor. “Range of Motion” opens on Michael and Sal at camp. But as he struggled writing a camp novel, he said, he gravitated to writing monologues from different members of one family.

The novel is largely told from Michael’s point of view. Trapp pulled some plot points and the general setting of a Catholic family in suburban Ohio from his life with Danny, and from interviews with other siblings in special needs families, often called “sibs.”

Both Trapp and Michael program their voice and some choice phrases into their brothers’ computers, both receive confession and wonder why their brothers didn’t confess as well. Both sets of families deal with a care crisis providing for their children. Both Trapp and Michael were certified to be their brothers’ nurses. Both Sal and Danny got calls from girls that Trapp and Michael wished were for them.

Not everything in the book is from Trapp’s life. For example, he jokes he killed his two siblings by not including them in the novel. (Though, his mother is receiving a copy with plans to highlight what’s accurate to their family life.) Sal has a power chair and runs into people’s shins. Danny didn’t have a power chair. “But I thought maybe he would like to do that,” Trapp said.

Understanding Sal is a constant concern in the novel. At a young age, Michael thinks he can hear in his mind what his brother is trying to communicate. But other characters get their say. The book jumps around to the points of view of his parents, stay-at-home mother Hannah and neuroscientist Gabe. (Trapp’s father is also a neuroscientist.)

Even though Danny and Sal both have limited vocabularies, one thing is clear: Sal is funny, with jabs and comic timing, like Danny was. “I feel like people aren’t really accustomed to thinking of people with intellectual disabilities as agents of humor,” Trapp said. “I wanted to introduce the world to a character like Sal.”

But Trapp said that overarching question of how much meaning can be ascribed to Sal, and how to know someone when you don’t have access to them, was a major part of writing the novel. 

“Where do you think someone’s overreaching or underreaching?” Trapp asked. “Is Gabe not granting Sal enough respect? Or is he defending Sal against projections from family members that are wishfully thinking, or almost colonizing, this point of view?”

Living in response 

Trapp said he sees his life as a response to Danny’s. He planned on being either a doctor and taking care of people with disabilities or a writer and writing about families like his.

At UO, those two worlds are mixed: He heads up the Disability Studies program, an interdisciplinary minor in the College of Arts and Sciences that studies the history and culture of people with disabilities, and the Kidd Creative Writing workshops.

As “Range of Motion” goes out into the world, Trapp is still writing about his relationship with his brother. He’s now working on a memoir, which will touch on memories of his life with Danny, experiences at Camp Cheerful, and how being a “sib” has impacted his personal life, including a divorce after Danny died.

But for “Range of Motion,” he wanted to leave death out. He hints at some medical issues, with Sal experiencing some of the early complications of the pneumonia that Danny died of, but wanted to avoid the narrative expectation of someone with a severe disability dying during the story.

“I was much more interested in his life,” Trapp said.

See Trapp talk about ‘Range of Motion’

Trapp will be talking about the novel at two events in Eugene this fall.

• As part of the UO’s Creative Writing Reading Series, Trapp will read from “Range of Motion” at 4:30 p.m. Oct. 29 at the Knight Library, 1501 Kincaid St., on the UO campus.
• Trapp will be joined by author Melissa Hart for a reading, conversation and Q&A session on their experiences growing up in special needs families at 7 p.m. Nov. 13 at Tsunami Books, 2585 Willamette St., Eugene.

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