A Loss for Words: The Story of Deafness in a Family

Lou Ann Walker was the eldest of three hearing children born to deaf parents. This is her story and theirs.

When you can hear and your parents are deaf, you bear the immense responsibility of being their ears and voices; of being a messenger between two worlds.

Because when you are deaf, people would rather talk to your toddler than try to communicate with you.

Lou Ann Walker paints her parents’ portrait with the utmost tenderness, but she tells too of the child’s frustration at their difference from other people, of the hurt inflicted by a world that is ignorantly cruel, and of her struggle to come to terms with her own feelings and realise her right to a voice of her own.

But A Loss For Words is about much more than deafness.

It opens a whole perspective on family relationships, survival, self-knowledge and love.