In the Little World: A True Story of Dwarfs, Love, and Trouble
By John H. Richardson
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HarperCollins, 257 pages, $25
John Richardson came upon the subject of this book through a magazine assignment for Esquire, and at first his interest didn’t go much beyond “sounds interesting, could be different.”
My sympathies lie initially with Richardson as he tries gamely, almost naively, to navigate the treacherous waters of his assignment, to cover the Little People of America’s convention, at which he, a tall man, stands out. He learns, and we do, too, right off the bat that “dwarf” or “little person” are the preferred terms, never “midget.” But he also learns that his subjects don’t necessarily welcome his presence and are concerned with his portrayal of them. Noticing him talking into his tape recorder, a woman rushes up and tearfully demands to know what he’s doing. He a reporter and he’s “credentialed,” he tells her, but she marches him down to the convention office and only relents when she’s assured by one of the officials that Richardson is here to do a “positive story.”
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Actually, that’s not Richardson’s goal. He wants to write an honest story that deals with historical and personal views of dread toward the Other, the Freak, and our concomitant views of beauty. In this he succeeds with a provocative mixture of insight and confession. He also eschews the typical, sentimental journalistic portrayal, usually a variation on the theme of big hearts in small bodies. Richardson is a kind of no-holds-barred, the-truth-will-set-you-free writer, and he lets his subjects know this from the outset. He sets his sights on four dwarfs in particular: Michael, an actor and stockbroker who goes to the conventions regularly; Meredith, a young woman who has never been to a convention and with whom Michael is smitten; Andrea, a combative woman who wants to be Richardson’s friend, not his subject; and Jocelyn, a stoic, 16-year-old Australian who needs an almost endless series of operations on her back and legs so she won’t be paralyzed.
The book is part chronicle, part memoir, in that Richardson sets out to be as honest about himself as he is about his subjects. He’s not going to be an exploiter. He’s “not some kind of Hard Copy scumbag but a genuine sensitive guy and serious writer” whose mother has cancer. Why are we told about his mother, and later about his father’s death? It makes him vulnerable, perhaps. Or maybe it makes him more manipulative; it seems more a rhetorically strategic move than a sincere disclosure of the kind he routinely makes about the dwarfs whose lives he follows.
The woman he calls Andrea is the most uncomfortable about his journalistic scrutiny. She tells him she doesn’t want to be written about in the book, but he’s a kind of disclosure junkie (he seems to want to include every e-mail from or phone conversation with Andrea and the others), and he needles her so much that she reluctantly agrees if he’ll change her name.
When his article appears in Esquire, some of his subjects are shocked, especially Michael, whose portrayal as arrogant and self-satisfied makes him an outcast among his friends in Little People of America. Richardson doesn’t seem to understand Michael’s anger, and he thinks he can remedy the situation by writing e-mails defending Michael to a dwarf listserv on the Internet.
Michael isn’t the only one upset by the article. E-mails and letters flood in to Esquire, quite a few disturbed by language they feel is insensitive: references to dwarfs as having “big butts” and “big heads,” and how there’s something “wrong” about them. Andrea writes an eloquent letter of protest in which she says:
“What many of us eventually learn, in part from participating in LPA, is that being a dwarf and having a different body is only that-different. Not, as he writes in his conclusion, `wrong’ or `inappropriate.’ “
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Surprisingly, Andrea doesn’t give up on Richardson, at least not for a while, and the two tussle through much of the rest of the book, Richardson frustrated that she misunderstands his use of the word “wrong,” and she wondering whether he really wants to be her friend or only considers her fodder for his book. When Andrea’s father dies, he calls to offer sympathy, and she asks if he’s taking notes.
By the end of the book, Andrea, Michael and Meredith have jettisoned Richardson. Only Jocelyn has stuck by him, though he chronicles the breakup of her parents’ 20-year marriage with the kind of ferocious, intimate detail that would seem well-suited for “Hard Copy.”
Richardson says this a book about the exposure of difficult truths, but it’s also a book about control and power and ethics, the sense of almost princely entitlement this writer feels about his assignment. Full disclosure becomes the writer’s god, to the point that it makes his subjects flee. Well, at least I’m honest, he claims.
But while Richardson is so obsessive about the physical appearances of his subjects, what do we know of him? He tells us he’s “tall and healthy,” one dwarf calls him “gorgeous,” and that’s about it. He discusses body image and absolutist notions of beauty in great detail, but never in relation to his own body. Toward the end, Richardson offers some generalized self-loathing, but one is already so suspicious of him that one suspects the book is little more than an announcement of his own physical superiority and unequivocating intellect. When he holds Jocelyn’s hand during one of her surgeries, he congratulates himself for the humanity of his gesture. He writes (sentimentally): “I was there with her, when I took her hand and later when she told me it was good, we walked together across the bridge of pain. Or so it seemed to me.”
Well, bravo.
Richardson writes that he “stumbled into” the subject of dwarfs, and that’s probably the best way to phrase it: For 250-odd pages, Richardson stumbles into, around and over dwarfs in a headlong dash to discover an elusive “truth” about beauty and difference.
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