In our current society, we don’t like to acknowledge that which make us uncomfortable. But then what do those who make others uncomfortable do? Persimmon Blackbridge’s Sunnybrook: A True Story with Lies, published 1996, explores this situation through the first-person narrative of a lesbian woman with learning disabilities working at a mental institute in the 1970s. There she is exposed to all sorts of situations where she encounters the exclusionary reactions of mainstream society, and must learn how to cope with this understanding of the world. Sunnybrook: A True Story with Lies is a collection of stories about the life of the author, including the stories “Red Carpet”, “The Interview”, “Truth”, “Typing”, “Mary”, “Rock Me”, “The Line”, …show more content…
We see how those outside of the ideal are treated, and how this structures how people live. It is not something people like the think about, since according to the medievalist who wrote to savage in April 2015, "we cover up the way in which our social power produces the conditions for this kind of identity" (savage 3). Society would rather ignore the issue than confront it, and so people are cast to the fringes rather than helped. The medievalist goes on to explain how those excluded from the dominant system will look elsewhere for a social identity (3), although this is not explored much in Sunnybrook. The stories focus more on how the outcasts are forced to act with those who cast them out, as opposed to each other. We see through her actions how she lived her life doing her best to hide, while fully aware she was not wanted. However, this strategy she uses of hiding aspects of herself tends to chip away at one's personality. A person living their life like this can never live completely honestly, and this weighs down upon a person. Blackbridge mentions how she "had no trouble reading the message" (8) of a negative ad about learning disabilities, and this speaks on a larger scale on how she understood her spot in this world. This is a battle so many people face, such as the religious kids The medievalist mentions in his letter who were lead to believe that their sexuality would destroy their religious identity (2). All of this suffering for their identity comes from a lack of understanding. The majority of people do not care to even try and learn about what they don't know, and this leads to a culture where complexities are ignored, and everyone is reduced to the simplest form of who they