This is a book about The Disabled Child. It is not a book about any particular child or any particular disability, but a book about a figure I call The Dis-abled Child that emerges from the stories parents tell about their real-life children with disabilities. This is a book about an expectation, an idea, and an ideal that is produced and reproduced in stories parents tell and that both captures and recreates a cultural sense of childhood and what it means to be a child with a disability. And so, this is a book about stories. It is about the shape of those stories, about their beginnings and how they get to their endings. It is about individual narratives; and it is about a collection of nar-ratives called “special needs” parental memoirs and what characterizes this collection.In this book I argue that “special needs” parental memoirs are a subge-nre of disability life writing with distinct conventions. With notable excep-tions, parental memoirs reiterate a dominant cultural narrative of disability as inherent in the individual and as compromising quality of life via the foreclosure of opportunities, especially in terms of future labor, sexuality, and reproduction. As these are markers of independence in United States discourses of development, the loss is thus narrated as a child’s incomplete future adulthood. Memoirs challenge this prognosis, and losses are often regained through a narrative achievement of normality in childhood, most typically through the enactment of gender and sexuality norms and/or nar-ratives of value or contribution; in other words, through narratives of pro-ductivity and potential reproductivity. The obstacles posed by disability thus overcome, the disabled child is rescripted into a normative life narrative and the promises of adulthood, rhetorically sidestepping the otherwise required adulthood achievements of autonomy and independence. By way of these generic conventions—through the telling of individual stories in familiar, generic ways—“special needs” parental memoirs collectively construct The Figure of The Disabled Child, the child who overcomes ableist exclusions of childhood, adulthood, and “normal” life.