White Picket Fences turns 8 today! So here’s a little back story I’m not sure I’ve told here before. I started working on a book in 2015 that was about reading books out loud to our children. And in that book (that never happened, though I wrote about 100 pages of it), I wrote a chapter about Penny reading about Ramona Quimby and wanting to be like Ramona and how I longed for a book for Penny that gave her a mirror of herself as a young girl with Down syndrome.
Eventually, the book about reading out loud to our kids became a book about my own childhood and all the ways our social and family situations as kids inform the opportunities we have as adults. It’s my story of coming to realize the social advantages I was handed through my heritage as a white American to married parents with education and affluence. It’s a book about learning to respond to the fact of those advantages with love rather than fear or anger or denial.
I wish that the themes weren’t still so relevant—the subtitle of the book is “Turning toward Love in a World Divided by Privilege.” We are certainly still a world divided, but I am also still confident that love can carry us toward compassion, understanding, and grace for ourselves and one another.
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Amy Julia Becker desires to challenge assumptions about the good life, proclaim the inherent belovedness of every human being, and help us envision and build a world of belonging where everyone matters. Amy Julia invites people to reimagine the good life through her writing and speaking on disability, faith, and culture. She is the author of several books, including To Be Made Well, White Picket Fences, Small Talk, and A Good and Perfect Gift. She is a guest opinion writer for national publications and hosts two podcasts: Take the Next Step and Reimagining the Good Life. Becker is a graduate of Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary (MDiv). She is a member of the Disability Ministry Network and the Alliance for Disability Justice and Ethics in Reproductive Genetics. She lives with her husband and their three children in western Connecticut.
