A Beautiful Snapshot of Sisterhood
A Review of
Rebecca Sue: A Sister’s Reflections on Disability, Faith, and Love
Kathleen Norris
Hardcover: IVP Formatio, 2025
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Reviewed by Gil Stafford
Rebecca Sue reads like a personal journal. Kathleen Norris, best known for her books on spirituality, provides the reader with an intimate family portrait of living daily life with a person who has a disability. In this case, perinatal hypoxia, the deprivation of oxygen at child birth that left Becky with cognitive disabilities and behavioral disorders.
Norris brilliantly builds Becky’s story on her sister’s more memorable sayings. “I passed the drunk test,” “I have the cutest doctor and he surfs,” “I hate my symptoms,” and “I bet I can have dessert now,” are four of my favorites. I treasure these stories because they reminded me of my own sister who had Prader-Willi syndrome. When I hurt the most, I find myself repeating my sister’s broken, tender, and power packed sayings.
At her most vulnerable moments, Becky would send Kathy a letter. In those letters we can see a relationship between two sisters who love and trust one another. A relationship that supersedes what we might expect would exist between a well-educated author and her sister who operates at the level of a sixth grader.
Still, as with my sister, Norris explains that Becky had a childlike faith, one her sister didn’t talk about. But a faith that included a guardian angel and a “secret husband” who visited when she needed him the most. Rebecca Sue should be read like a devotional book. One brief chapter a day, followed by a lectio divina reflection.
My one fear about this book is that the reader might innocently pass over the issues of medical insurance the Norris family faced. Even as a middle-class family, the weight of the missing components of insurance due to Becky’s situation was near overwhelming at times. The timeliness of this book being published in 2025, without Norris’s intent, points a finger at the dismantling of Medicaid. There are fifteen million developmentally disabled people in the United States who rely on Medicaid, most of whom are now at risk of being uninsured and subsequently without medical care because of the recent decisions made by our government. Sad and shameful. We can do better.
Gil Stafford
Gil Stafford, PhD, DMin, is a writer, spiritual guide, life coach, alchemist of the soul, and practitioner of Tarot. He speaks, consults, and leads retreats and pilgrimages. In his former lives, he played professional baseball, was a university baseball coach, a university president, and an Episcopal priest and Canon Theologian. Life is a pilgrimage and Gil has taken many, including walking Ireland coast-to-coast, as well as leading groups along the Wicklow Way. His publications include The Bible and the Tarot; Walking with the Spiritual but Not Religious;Meditations on Blue Jesus; Wisdom Walking; and When Leadership and Spiritual Direction Meet. You can find Gil at https://gilstafford.com.
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