Greg Marshall On Writing Fearlessly And Rediscovering Queer Joy

Growing up in Utah, Greg Marshall always knew he was gay. What he wasn’t aware of was that he was also disabled. His parents had always explained away his slight limp and multiple leg surgeries as due to “tight tendons.” It wasn’t until he was thirty and applying for private health insurance that he came across his diagnosis of cerebral palsy in his earliest medical records. In his memoir, Leg: The Story of A Limb And The Boy Who Grew From It, Marshall charts his childhood and young adulthood with precision and wit. His fun-loving family leaps from the page, especially his charismatic mother, and her decades-long battle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and his wise and bemused father. Whether it’s his parents’ lie of omission about his diagnosis, his early relationships, and his ultimate romance with the man who becomes his husband, Marshall recounts his life with blistering honesty and enormous compassion. Critics have raved about Marshall’s debut. Buzzfeed praised Leg by writing, “With signature wit and humor, Marshall takes material that could be morbid in the hands of a lesser writer, and dares his readers not to laugh.” In its starred review, Bookpage called it a “riotously funny book that will steal your heart from the very first page.” Marshall spoke to us in late June about writing fearlessly, Utah, and writing himself into his own story.