I had polio as a child. I walk on crutches. This is not, ordinarily, something I discuss in these essays – it sits in the background of my life the way any long-established fact does, unremarkable to me even if it isn't always to others. But lately I've been thinking about what it actually means, philosophically and psychologically, to move through the world in a body that other people notice. And I've begun to suspect that it has something to do with why I write the way I do – and, more...