This book has potential. The reader is introduced to several ‘interabled’ couples who share the story of their relationship and discuss both the ordinary and peculiar challenges and joys of their unusual partnerships. Before listening to this book, I found the idea of a romantic partnership between a caretaker and care recipient unappealing and incomprehensible and those attitudes were confirmed rather than softened.
The author of this book is himself a member of an interabled couple, and throughout the text he discusses his own relationship and compares himself and his wife to the other couples in the book. And herein lies the problem. Mr. Mattlin is profoundly disabled, heavily dependent on his wife (he employs caregivers, at slave wages, to help her) to care for him in the same way as a mother would an infant. She spoon feeds him, washes him, dresses him, toilets him, etc). Despite this, Mr. Mattlin consistently reveals himself to be selfish, preposterously over-confident, demanding, unlikable, and insightful. He both celebrates his dependency (in a grotesque perversion of ‘disability pride’) and minimises the crushing burden of his care on others.
In a spectacular demonstration of delusion and tone-deafness, he ends the book by recounting his constant flirting with waitesses and other women, a habit he developed to satisfy his own ego. Waitresses, of course, are the perfect target for such a man, a captive audience dependent on the tips of their customers, and thus unable to categorically reject the crude advances of little men like the author. And in the end, that is the lingering impression Ben Mattlin leaves. He just a creep in a wheelchair, forcing a waitress to conspire with him in his absurd delusions of his own desirability.