Beryl Potter was a reserved working-class mother of three living a decent life, or so it seemed, when a harmless slip and fall marked the unravelling of everything that she had known about herself and the world around her. Over the course of six years, she endured unimaginable pain. As doctors raced to save her life, her limbs and eyesight were taken from her one by one. In the span of a few years, she lost nearly half her body, her financial security, her home, her husband, and any semblance of a recognizable future.

A survivor of more than one hundred surgeries, a dangerous opioid addiction, and multiple suicide attempts, Beryl Potter devoted herself to bettering the lives of other people with disabilities and made a tremendous contribution to disability awareness from the 1970s to 1990s. In this unparalleled biography, Dustin Galer demonstrates how Beryl Potter seemed to crack the code of the social system that oppressed her. By wading into the weeds of her complicated life before and after her accident, Galer leaves readers with a complex portrait of a woman who defied and challenged gender and disability norms of her time, paving the way for disability justice.

Dustin Galer is a professional historian with a PhD in history from the University of Toronto. He wrote the first book-length history of the Canadian disability rights movement, Working towards Equity, and has published widely on the topic of disability history and labour. He works as a personal historian producing family and corporate history projects and is currently working on his next book about the tragic death of a developmentally disabled man and the complicated quest for justice. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario where he can often be found toiling away in his garden.

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JUDY REBICK is a well-known social justice and feminist activist, writer, journalist, educator, and speaker. She is the author of Transforming Power: From the Personal to the Political, Occupy This!, Ten Thousand Roses: The Making of a Feminist Revolution, and Imagine Democracy. Founding publisher of rabble.ca, Canada’s popular independent online news and discussion site, Judy continues to blog on rabble.ca. She is the former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, Canada’s largest women’s group, and was the first CAW Gindin Chair in Social Justice and Democracy at Ryerson University. During the 1990s, she was the host of two national TV shows on CBC Newsworld and is a frequent commentator on CBC Radio and Television. In the 1980s, she was a well-known spokesperson for the pro-choice movement during the fight to legalize abortion. She lives in Toronto.

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• Winner, Donald Grant Creighton Award