Henry Kisor was born in 1940. When Kisor was three, he contracted meningitis and possibly encephalitis, and the drugs used to save his life destroyed his hearing. Thinking that his three years of exposure to speech would benefit his future, Kisor’s parents signed up for a mail order course on teaching your deaf child to speak. Even in this memoir, Kisor thanks the woman who developed the program for making him fit in with the hearing world. After college, he spent most of his adult life in Illinois working for the Chicago-Sun Times in a prestigious position as a “newspaperman” and the book reviewer. This memoir, What’s That Pig Outdoors?, was published in 1990 and revised in 2010 (I read the more current edition). Kisor’s title comes from a time his son said something and Kisor read his lips incorrectly.

Kisor explains who he is better than I could in summary: “I am what is called an ‘oralist’. That is, I depend wholly on spoken language and lip reading, however imperfect they may be, to help me live and work in a hearing world. I do not know sign language at all.” Oh, how I can see my Deaf professor now! Almost no one can truly read lips, and Kisor acknowledges this. Lipreading relies heavily on preparedness, context, predicting, and guesswork. Wouldn’t Kisor’s life have been richer had he learned ASL and could communicate with his fellow deaf Americans? I can see my professor signing SAD++.

And yet, Kisor’s personality was absolutely jovial, that of an opportunistic lad in a hearing world. Now, please do not read this book review as an endorsement for telling deaf people to “try harder” or that deaf people could learn to speak if only they were more motivated. Think of it this way; most of us who have taken a linguistics class struggle through the unit on identifying where in the mouth we make each sound, and yet deaf children are told to make every sound correctly by feel and memorization only. They only know they are correct when someone else confirms it. That’s how hard it is, what Kisor does in speaking himself and reading the mouth shapes of others.

I appreciated Kisor’s memoir for showing me a different life from the traditional story of Deaf people I have studied. The common narrative is someone who is deaf at infancy, typically sent to general public school with an interpreter or deaf public school where everything is in ASL, isolation. Mostly, family can’t sign, so the child feels isolated until they find other Deaf adults and become themselves, feeling proud of their identity. Kisor, as far as I could tell, didn’t befriend or know much about deaf people until he was quite older.

I’d like to mention some ways in which Kisor’s life took a different trajectory, and some commonalities, with other deaf authors to convince you to read What’s That Pig Outdoors? and not feel all memoirs about deafness are the same. Similarly to Rachel Kolb’s parents, Kisor’s mom and dad felt he could do anything until he couldn’t. Really, they weren’t just supportive; they were advocates:

“…I came home with a sheet of paper the teacher had given me. On one side was a list of hobbies for the hearing and on the other a list of hobbies for the deaf. I don’t recall what the hobbies were — in fact, I don’t remember the episode at all. But Mother and Dad went through the roof. They would have no truck with the assumption that deaf children automatically cannot do certain things. Only when I had tried them and failed could they be set aside as impossibilities.”

He was encouraged to try anything first; if he failed, okay, that wasn’t for him, just like any child.

A difference between Kolb and Kisor is Kisor went through general public school with no interpreters because he was born long before the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 that would guarantee him access to an interpreter in school. Instead, he read books on class topics beforehand, preparing himself with context to piece together what his teachers lectured on. He read their lips and relied on notes taken by willing classmates, as a deaf person cannot look at paper to write notes and another person talking at the same time.

Both Kolb and Kisor loved written English, taking refuge in books and appreciating the nuance of word choices. Eventually, Kisor becomes a journalist, which included interviews with famous authors like Anthony Burgess, Maurice Sendak, Alice McDermott, Tom Woolfe, Joseph Heller, and Walker Percy. Interviews were a family affair when Kisor’s wife would type up the transcript of a recorded interview. But if Kisor can read lips, why did he need a full transcript so desperately that he had to use his wife’s free labor? Kisor admits, “More than once an interview has ended without my understanding a single word the interviewee said. The transcript reveals controversial statements not questioned, promising avenues not taken.” Therefore, though the author celebrates his identity as a deaf oralist, he’s honest about the limitations. He also confesses some hearing people cannot understand his speech at all.

And you do feel Kisor is honest in his memoir. Not only admitting his limitations, he explains his frustrations and faults. When a Black hearing colleague who worked in the manual labor side of the newspaper called him a “dummy,” Kisor confesses that he almost called the man a racial slur, but held his tongue. Furthermore, he openly acknowledges that he wants to be part of hearing society and has accepted stereotypes about (other) deaf people as true. Still, in a choice wisely made, he argues that his life should not serve as model for how other deaf people live because there are too many variabilities. Also, his life has not been easy. In fact, to feel more comfortable with hearing people, he became an alcoholic while working for the newspaper until his wife, Debby, threatened to take their sons and leave him.

Speaking of Debby, Kisor also builds his ethos with gratefulness. He is always thankful to anyone who made a measurable improvement in his personal and professional lives, from his wife and parents to his professors and coworkers. Each is named, discussed thoroughly, and thanked, though Kisor never writes this in a list-like fashion, which I’ve almost implied. In fact, his writing is gorgeous, hinting at the classic novels he’s analyzed and written essays about as a student. A few times, I came across words bigger than my mental dictionary — this is a learned writer that readers will appreciate.

But really, like some of the best writers, he’s funny too, often at his own expense. On his first date with his now-wife, he shares her fears: “[Debby] says that the idea of going out with a deaf man on a blind date almost overwhelmed her, and her roommate had to push her down the stairs to meet me. She says that she could not understand a word I said the entire evening. She says that before I had taken her home she knew she was going to marry me. Go figure.” Even though he’s funny throughout, Kisor never makes a joke at the expense of being honest. He emphasizes that hearing-deaf marriages divorce at a rate of about 90% because it is like an elite, posh New Yorker marrying a country farmer; there’s nothing wrong with either, but how do they coincide? In his marriage, he and Debby were both part of hearing culture.

Lastly, I want to add that the 2010 update at the end of What’s That Pig Outdoors? is not minor. A lot changed from 1990 to 2010, including the passage of the ADA, but also the common use of email and texting, which changed Kisor’s life. Kisor emphasizes communication access via technology for a deaf person “an important way of keeping the walls of isolation from closing in.”

Beyond technology advances, he’s thought more about deafness (a medical condition) vs. Deaf culture. People ask him hypothetical questions. When people ask him what he would do if he had a deaf infant, he thinks about it carefully. If the child became deaf after a few years of being hearing, he would lean toward oralism. If the child could lip read or had residual hearing, he would lean toward learning to lip read. However, if the child were born deaf, he notes, “…I’d plunge right into teaching the infant sign — and learning it myself — so that it would acquire language as early as possible. As soon as it was old enough, I’d encourage it to learn speech and lipreading as a second language. I’d give the child every possible chance to become a member of the larger English-speaking community, the same one to which I belong, as well as to the signing culture. And, in any case, if my child could not master oral communication sufficiently and instead displayed an affinity for the signing world, I’d not swoon in despair. In fact, I’d plunge wholeheartedly with my child into the special culture of the deaf. Though they are perhaps limited in ways the successful oral death are not, the signing deaf are just as valuable and productive members of society, their lives just as rich and full as those of the oral deaf.”

And that, I think, is the beauty of going on Kisor’s journey. He’s always learning and considering his opinions as things change, a valuable lesson in our age of double-down mulishness.