Nyle DiMarco's inspiring memoir captures his joy of growing up, along with his twin brother, in a home with three other generations of Deaf family members and the frustrations of navigating a world designed for and run by hearing people. The innovative way in which DiMarco and coauthor Robert Siebert tell these stories is by interspersing American Sign Language (ASL) into the English text. What is known as ASL gloss is a transcription, sign by sign, of ASL on the page, and it is represented in the memoir in ALL CAPS. ASL gloss has its own style rules, so it can be read initially as broken English. But it reminds readers that ASL is syntactically different from spoken or written English.
After graduating with a mathematics degree, DiMarco began freelance modeling and appeared on America's Next Top Model in 2015 and Dancing with the Stars the following year. He won both competitions. (The chapter on DWTS is a rollercoaster of emotions.) He was outed by a Deaf vlogger at age 26 and came out on Twitter as "sexually fluid." This memoir affords him the space to explore his sexuality with much more depth and honesty. Mixed in with his empowering autobiographical tales are fascinating historical facts and stories from Deaf history and culture. He explains the difference between ASL and Signed Exact English (SEE); how the average lip-reader captures only around 30% of a speaker's words; and the invention in the 1960s of the teletypewriter (TTY), which could be considered a kind of text messaging between Deaf people using the machine. Deaf Utopia is an empowering, eye-opening and beautifully expressed memoir. --Kevin Howell, independent reviewer and marketing consultant