Margaret Combs - Memoir
Award-winning journalist Margaret Combs began her writing life as
a National Public Radio reporter and education correspondent for the Boston Globe. She is a recipient of both the
Associated Press Award for Arts Reporting and the United Press International
Award for Best Documentary and was a finalist for the NAR's 2015 TORCH Memorial
Prize. In her memoir
Hazard: A Sister's Flight From Family and a
Broken Boy (2017) Combs writes about the emotional intricacies of growing
up with a severely disabled sibling. She shows how her Southern Baptist family
coped with the reality of autism in an era of ignorance and shame, the 1950s
through the 1970s, and shares her own tragedy and anguish of being torn between
helping her brother and yearning for her own life.
Hazard is also a
story of indelible bonds between siblings: the one between Combs and her
sister, and the deep and rueful one she has with her disabled brother. Initially
fueled by a wish that her brother had never been born, the author eventually
arrives in a deeper place of gratitude for this same brother, whom she loves
and who loves her in return.
