All the Difference is on Books on the Subway
In her elegant book All the Difference, Patricia Horvath recounts the difficult time of wrestling both with medical challenges and adolescence. It is a graceful story not of overcoming challenge, but of accepting it.
— Nina MacLaughin, The Boston Globe
Throughout her book, Horvath waxes beautifully on her inner thoughts and memories, and how her disability changed both her physical body and her identity.
— Sarah Evans, Hippocampus Magazine
All The Difference is the poignant story of a woman’s struggle with scoliosis and early onset osteoporosis, but it is also the story of navigating the fractures of family and growing up. Horvath carefully excavates the fault lines and intersections of these powerful strands in her narrative, writing a heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful story about acceptance.
— Martha McPhee Author of Bright Angel Time & Dear Money
All the Difference is as brave, honest, and beautiful a book as I have read in years. The book abounds in wonderfully vivid scenes and great humor even as it makes us understand the cruel and curious ways the bodies we live with create—both physically and emotionally—who we are. A stunning, memorable achievement.
— Jay Neugeboren, Author of Imagining Robert
Writing with a delicate, yet steely lyricism, Horvath gives us a memoir that is not about how we endure but how we decide to live. Eloquent and beautifully written, this is a book about growing up, healing and accepting a “challenged” body, and claiming a writer’s voice. Mostly it is about how anyone can chisel a life of limitless possibility.
— Marita Golden, Author of Migrations of the Heart & The Wide Circumference of Love
Her narrative manages to be vivid and concrete, on the one hand, and astute and reflective, on the other. It's funny, touching, shrewd, smart, and luminously writer--a remarkable achievement.
— G. Thomas Couser, Author of Memoir: An Introduction & Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability and Life Writing
All the Difference, despite the pain it recounts, is never self-pitying, and it’s much more than a litany of medical problems. Horvath looks back at other landmarks from her youth — a mean-spirited elementary school teacher, an icy relationship with her stepfather, listening to rock and roll, her first tentative relationships with boys — with a sharp eye and often a dry sense of humor.
— Steve Pfarrer, Daily Hampshire Gazette
A beautifully written, thoughtful memoir…Remarkably, there is not a sentence that hints of self-pity or lashes out at fate for the injustice or pain of her circumstances. Horvath's short memoir is full of pleasures.
— Jonna Semeiks, Confrontation
A powerful story of survival, crackling with honesty, vulnerability, and wit, Horvath’s memoir All The Difference lays bare the myths of disability and the ways we are bound by our body’s betrayals—whether they be overt or invisible—and how our hearts and minds might surpass the most difficult of limits.
— Michelle Hoover, Author of The Quickening & Bottomland
Witty and unflinching, candid and funny, Horvath revisits her childhood diagnosis of severe scoliosis and her teenage years when surgery, braces, and body casts defined her, proclaiming her otherness. A master storyteller, Horvath explores the ways her disability shaped her and how, once her disability became invisible, she was free to shape herself. All the Difference is a riveting read.
— Kate Southwood, Author of Falling to Earth & Evensong
I was quite taken with All the Difference and found it hard to put down. In a chapter near the end of her memoir, Horvath asks herself a question that keeps readers thinking: “What am I now? Formerly disabled? Healed? Reformed? (Literally, yes, I suppose this is so; I have been re-formed, [ . . . ] No one points, stares, yet I still can’t shake the feeling that I’m ‘passing’ for able-bodied.” My thought is that she may lay to rest her feeling of “passing,” and instead, keep giving us more of her remarkable, compelling writing.
— Valerie Wiland in New Pages
A talented storyteller, Patricia has a gifted way of reflecting on her difficult past with equal parts serious and sassy. There is always a touch of humour, even when she describes the most horrible experiences.
— Martha Carter, Twisted Outreach Project