riter Lillie Lainoff, author of , landed her agent while she was still a junior in college. But although she’s known since she was 5 that she wanted to be a writer, and had been diagnosed with postural orthostatic postural syndrome (POTS) several years earlier, she had only just started writing stories that included disabled characters. It was writing itself that led her to that choice: Lainoff’s September 2014 op-ed in the , titled “Hollywood has it wrong: I’m a teenager with an illness, and it’s not glamorous at all,” netted responses from readers that nudged her toward making disabled persons main characters in her work. Lainoff’s stories until then had “disabled side characters, not disabled main characters, because I don’t think I felt comfortable yet writing a story that centered our voices. But [I] started getting feedback from readers of the op-ed talking about how much it meant to them and how important it was for pushed her to include disabled people in her creative work as main characters.
