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Commentary
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Street Roots • April 28-May 4, 2017
Robert Hoge writes of a beautiful life lived ugly
BY SUSAN STORER CLARK
C O N T R IB U T IN G C O L U M N IS T
e was born ugly. How ugly was he?
Maybe that sounds like the setup to a
joke, but the punch line isn’t funny.
He was so ugly his mother wanted to
abandon him in the hospital. She said to his
father, “Perhaps he’ll die.”
Robert Hoge writes that he was born with
a huge lump on the front of his head, “...a
massive bulge that jutted out from the top of
my forehead and ran all the way down to the
tip of where my nose should have been. It
was almost twice the size of my newborn fist.
It had formed early during my development
and made a mess of my face, pushing my
eyes to either side of my head. Like a fish.”
More than that, both his legs were
deformed. Only one of them extended to a
knee, and both feet were malformed.
His parents left him in the hospital. “I was
sent to the hospital’s intensive care ward -
ugly and alone.”
He had his first operation when he was five
days old, and the surgeon told his parents that
the boy’s brain was fine. Another surgeon said
they could do a lot to fix him. While that was
not exactly what his parents wanted to hear,
they and their four children decided to bring
their ugly baby home.
From that grim beginning, the book takes
off into a spirited, interesting and funny
account of Robert’s childhood as an ugly kid.
He spent a lot of time in the hospital, having
dozens of operations to make his eyes function
normally and his face look more normal. He
grew up in Australia, which has government-
paid health insurance, so the extensive medical
care did not impoverish his working-class
family. He writes that he was still ugly, and not
just ordinary ugly, “A-grade, top-of-the-range
ugly.”
By the time he went to school, he also had
artificial legs. Teasing and meanness were
inevitable, and Hoge writes about some of the
more dramatic incidents, but gradually, things
began to change for him. The operations
continued, and he gradually came to look less
different, and some kids seemed not to notice
or at least not to care. “I wasn’t the most
H
Book Review:
“Ugly: My
Memoir,” by
Robert Hoge
IL L U S T R A T IO N B Y L O N E S O M E D A U G H T E R
popular kid in school. I didn’t have people
rushing to spend every possible second with
me at lunch. But I wasn’t totally shunned and
ignored either.”
Still, he’d pick up a new cruel nickname
every six months or so, and his reaction in the
book is to rate and describe his top 10
nicknames by origin, originality, hurt factor,
laugh factor and how he got over it. The worst
were “cripple” and “toe-nose,” the latter
coming from the fact that surgeons had used
cartilage from one of his amputated toes to
build his nose. He writes that the last one still
has the power to hurt. His favorite was
“Transformer,” after the robot toys that could
change from humanoid into cars or planes, and
referred to his artificial legs. He gives it a high
rating for originality, and a low hurt factor.
Without making too big a deal of it, the
courage Hoge describes is amazing. When he
went to camp, and the boys in his cabin had to
make a contribution to the camp talent show,
he told them the only talent he had was doing
handstands. They decided to go with it. So,
when it came his turn to perform, he sat down
on the stage and took off his artificial legs in
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front of all the other kids. “Suddenly I was
onstage with my legs off and dozens of kids
staring at me... I planted my hands on the
stage and pushed myself up.” He held steady
for a few seconds, and then walked on his
hands across the stage. When he finished,
there was a moment of stunned silence, and
then everyone broke into applause and loud
cheering. And his act was voted the best in the
show. “We weren’t showered with trophies or
prize money, but we did each receive a
chocolate bar, which was even better as far as I
was concerned. Maybe taking my legs off
wasn’t that much of a big deal after all.”
Still, it’s not like the clouds parted and life
was all sunshine after that, and the reader
doesn’t expect it. This book shows the
everyday courage of Robert and his entire
family, and the honesty and clarity with which
his family dealt with him and the world’s
reaction to him. They knew his disability would
keep him from most kinds of physical work, so
they simply didn’t accept bad grades. When he
came home with a bad grade, his father would
say, “Robert, you’re not going to be digging
ditches for a living. You’ve got to try harder.”
And he has.
On the book’s dust jacket, he’s described as
someone who’s done pretty much every kind of
writing there is. He’s been a journalist, a
speechwriter, a science writer and a political
adviser. He’s also written numerous articles
published in Australia and overseas. Yes, he is
married, and he and his wife have two
daughters, and one of the things he enjoys is
“talking with people about looking different
and being disabled.” And, yes, his face is still
ugly.
His book is a quick and fairly easy read, “for
ages 8 and up,” and is published by the
Penguin Young Readers Group. Some books
written for young people have caught on with
adults — after all, the “Hunger Games” series
was written for young people. This is an
inspiring read for anyone, and it’s never, ever
sappy.
When he writes near the end, “It was me,
my legs, and my ugly face against the world,”
most people’s money will be on Robert.
Reprinted from Real Change News, Seattle.