Mother Tongue: A Memoir, by Sara Nović

Mother Tongue does both.

Sara Nović, whose novel True Biz was the One Book, One Philadelphia selection in 2024, here tells the story of a child who loved church but despised Sunday dresses; a child who experienced a congenital heart arrhythmia and who gradually lost their hearing; a person who became a writer, a professor, an activist, the parent of a biological child (who is hearing) and an adopted child (who is deaf).

This book flouts the stereotype of personal writing as self-involved “navel gazing.” Mother Tongue is a memoir that tangles with the world.

“Affliction” and oralism

Two quotes serve as epigraphs. One, a chilling declaration from Alexander Graham Bell: “I am sure that there is no one among the deaf who desires to have his affliction handed down to his children.”

The other is from Mark Kozyk, a deaf gay man who died by suicide in 2024. “Language is a love code,” he wrote.

That juxtaposition captures the content and emotional range of Mother Tongue, a book that juxtaposes the histories of bias against deaf people with Nović’s own story of struggle, selfhood, resistance, and joy.

They navigate deftly through the push for oralism in deaf education; the infliction of violence (including medical violence and institutionalization) against the deaf and hard-of-hearing; the incursions of the religious right into public education; purity culture and the evangelical church; and the ways different vectors of marginalization (disability, queerness, race) intersect and collide.

Nović connects the dots between ableism and white supremacy, xenophobia and fear of deafness, the lack of interpreters in medical settings and the high rates of pregnancy complications for deaf and hard-of-hearing people.

Deeply revealing histories

There were so many pages I bookmarked with sticky strips like neon exclamation points, grateful to Nović for their deep dive into primary sources:

How did I not know that…

A series of municipal laws (“ugly laws”) in the late 19th century made being disabled in public a crime punishable with a fine or imprisonment.

An 1880 conference in Milan on deaf education (in which just one of the 164 delegates was deaf!) resolved that sign language was inferior to spoken language.

Deaf people and those with other disabilities, including children, were among the first to be killed en masse by the Nazi regime.

Alexander Graham Bell was a darling of eugenicist circles.

As of 2022, laws allowing the nonconsensual sterilization of disabled people still existed in 31 states and Washington, D.C.

Nović weaves these disturbing facts and complicated ideas with a weft of vividly rendered scenes from touchpoints across their life. The book is never didactic, because they have skin in the game. It’s never righteous, because they insists on their own transparency. Nović, too, once believed deafness meant a life without music. For many years, they tried to hide their hearing loss. They swallowed, for a time, the notion that speech equals intelligence.

“A broken version of my peers”?

“I don’t remember going deaf,” Nović writes. What they remember is being 12 years old, failing a hearing test, then ripping up the test results and flushing them down the school toilet. “I had never met a deaf person, knew nothing about sign language or deaf culture, and had no framework for understanding myself as anything other than a broken version of my peers.”

The chapter doesn’t stop there. Nović segues into the anatomy and neurology of listening, the ancients’ views of deafness (Socrates believed the deaf had innate intelligence; aboriginal Australians used hand signs to communicate between tribes), the misunderstanding of cochlear implants (they do not “cure” deafness), and the 19th-century debates that pitted oralism (teaching deaf children to speak and lip-read) against manualism (bilingual deaf education through signed and written language).

Then they wind back to their own story: a visit, during college, to a church with an ASL interpreter and a small cluster of worshippers who were signing along. One of them wiggled over to make space for Nović in the pew.

Nović describes that moment as “conversion…It was spiritual, in that I first had to be broken enough to accept the real offering, what neither acknowledgement from hearing people nor exposure to deaf ones, technology, or accommodations, or even sign language itself could provide: friendship.”

Grief, hope, and innovation

A strength of this memoir is its refusal to collapse complicated questions into binaries: yes, the insistence on oralism as a means of education for the deaf stole language from generations of children. And yes, sometimes those limits fostered creative pushback.

“In the same year the Milan Conference banned signed language from schools, the US deaf community founded the National Association of the Deaf,” Nović writes, and “…ASL was passed down in secret, dorms and bathrooms and back alleys becoming the real classrooms…The inheritance is the pain, the pressure, but also the invitation—to record, to tell stories, to prove we were here.”

They apply the same both/and lens to the story of adopting K (Nović shields immediate family members by using only their initials), a deaf child born in Thailand.

Nović makes the case that inter-country adoption is both ableist and classist, too often exploiting some parents’ poverty to fulfill other (typically white, Western) parents’ desires. And (as Nović’s husband, an adoptee, often notes), many adoptions result in joyful, integrated lives of opportunities—including access to deaf education and disability services—that would have been out of reach in the child’s country of birth.

Nović acknowledges the inseparability of grief and hope, oppression and generativity. It is a memoir that finds glimmers of promise even as they deliver a last-chapter litany of all the ways the Trump administration has chipped away at science, education, health care, diversity, and freedom.

Marveling at the future

Nović recounts K’s response to a homework assignment on identity. He tells his class, using ASL, that he is “five years old. I’m Thai. I’m Jewish. I’m deaf. I have brown skin. I’m an adoptee.” Her other son, S, declared to his teacher, “I’m a CODA [child of deaf adults]! That means I’m an advocate for the deaf community!”

While protecting the kids’ identities, Nović allows us to know their sons’ exuberance, grit, vulnerability, and imagination. In the end, they step back from the story to marvel at the future their children will inhabit and create. No one, they remind us, has the privilege of living outside of history. And all of us, they insist, have a stake in fostering a more just, equitable and inclusive world.

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