It was there in substance, but not in the reality he found as a teen on the rehab ward or, later, in his home and school. The boy who had loved sports and dances became an intellectual, an outsider. Mee admits this in his memoir, but in small ways. Years after finding himself in a largely inaccessible world, he welcomed changes like ramps brought about by the disability rights movement, reasoning that such accommodations might come in handy when he grew old and was not as independent. A Nearly Normal Life would be interesting if only for the slice of 1950s history it saves from obscurity, even without the few pages of epilogue with which Mee, looking back at the age of sixty, chooses to end the book.
Threads seem to be missing.
The Mee at the end of the book, content at last with a new career, a settled life and loving relationship, seems to have weathered too many storms without letting the reader weather them along with him. Yet the connecting thread from boy to man is there for readers to discover. Polio, with its life-changing effects, never could have been an isolated event in the author's life. Just how much it did is reflected in the mellower Mee who writes the epilogue as a now-happy man.