Sara Nović Shares Some True Biz with UConn Students and Faculty

Written by Brenda Brueggemann, with support from the DAC Team 

Tuesday Feb. 6, 5-6:15pm.   

Author Sara Nović joined UConn students and faculty in a reading and conversation around her New York Times bestselling (young adolescent) novel, True Biz. From Austin Bldg. room 217 (the English Department’s “Stern Lounge” meeting room), Nović joined students from the ASLN / WGSS cross-listed course, “Women and Gender in the Deaf World” – and about 20 other guests – for pizza, cookies, a reading from her first chapter, along with a rich follow-up conversation.  

The room was full and cozy. The discussion was too.  

We learned of Novic’s “inspiration” for the novel from real news about a certain cochlear implant company who had been known to make faulty cochlear implants that caused deaf people pain, dizziness, headaches, and more.  (See: Advanced Bionics LLC to Pay Over $12 Million for Alleged False Claims for Cochlear Implant Processors.) We also carried out conversations – using multiple languages and modalities – ruminating on Nović’s stylistic attempts as a writer to create the story with a braided narrative between three primary characters, as well as the author’s decisions about leaving the story “unsettled” and without a clear-cut ending – a very conscious choice that Novic made in hopes that it would invite the reader in all the more to “shape the future of Charlie’s story” themselves. We learned of Nović’s  affinity with the novels’ primary protagonist, young deaf and implanted girl-teen, Charlie. We pondered Novic’s expressions of forgiveness and understanding for Charlie’s mother, who was distant from, yet insistent about, Charlie’s use of the cochlear implant and Charlie’s emergence in hearing (normalized) culture. We mused on Charlie’s  very diverse “boyfriend” choices.  

And between the auto-captions on the Zoom webinar screen (where author Sara Nović was) to live interpreters in the room and a real-time captioner, we witnessed and absorbed this event in a multiplicity of languages, modalities, meanings. It was A Happening like maybe no other (yet) at UConn. 

* note: the book’s title comes from an ASL expression,<true biz> – meaning “seriously” or “real talk.”   See how <true biz> is signed and what it means here.