An Ambler writer worries about the future of deaf culture in Philly and elsewhere

Charlie Serrano, the 15-year-old protagonist in Sara Nović's New York Times Best Seller True Biz, sneaks in to dance clubs, drops Molly, and is at odds with her mother.

She’s also deaf, hates her cochlear implants, is learning American Sign Language, and hooking up with classmates at her boarding school, River Valley School for the Deaf.

River Valley’s grounds, Nović said, were inspired by the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf’s Mount Airy campus, where it was housed from 1892 to 1984, before moving to its current home in Germantown. Founded in 1820, it is the country’s third-oldest school for the deaf.

”There were dorms, farms, a mechanic shop,” said Nović. “They were beautiful stone buildings.”

True Biz is this year’s Free Library of Philadelphia’s One Book, One Philadelphia pick, the annual city-sponsored program that encourages Philadelphians to read and discuss the same book. Last year’s One Book was Charles Wu’s Interior Chinatown.

”This is huge,” said Nović, who is deaf and lives in Ambler with her partner and their two sons. She reads my questions as subtitles in a video chat, answering aloud and in sign language. “The deaf community is strong in Philly. People joke in the deaf community that when Philly signers are in the house, you know we are here,” she said.

Philly’s deaf community is more than a century old, our ASL accent is Philly-fly, and we are known worldwide for our aggressive and expressive signs. (Really, should we expect anything less?) In 2016 the University of Pennsylvania’s linguistics department released a study that documented an ASL accent unique to Philly. The accent is obvious when people sign words such as, chocolate, river, or park. (There isn’t an official sign for jawn but an amusing spoof lives on YouTube suggesting what such a sign would look like.)

Charlie’s 384-page coming-of-age story is a juicy tome, replete with unexpected twists, turns, and heart tugs. Yet, at its core, Nović's novel is cautionary: If deaf children like Charlie are forced to wear cochlear implants and discouraged from learning ASL, sign language will become extinct. Deaf schools will close. Deaf culture will die. That makes True Biz a novel about social justice, too.

Nović is among the growing number of deaf advocates who fear their culture is on the verge of disappearing. Many deaf children who receive implants before they turn 3 aren’t learning sign language, leading to a dearth of enrollment in schools for the deaf. Cochlear implants have been known to malfunction, and children who are deaf and don’t know sign language often have behavioral issues because they’ve been deprived of language and can’t express themselves.

The 36-year-old award-winning author, teacher, and advocate grew up in Bucks County. She failed her first hearing test as a seventh grader at Holicong Middle School in Central Bucks and was mainstreamed into Central Bucks County High School with hearing aids. It wasn’t until she took sign language classes and went to deaf meetups did she find her community. “It’s such a wild feeling when you finally meet other deaf people,” Nović said. “It’s like, wow, I’m not an alien. That’s a high that’s unparalleled.”

She’s not a fan of the gene therapy treatment doctors at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia used earlier this year to give a deaf child hearing in one ear. Deafness, she says, isn’t a disease that stops people from living and should be cherished as a form of a diversity. “A world without deaf people or sign language would be terrible,” Nović said. “They are trying to pop us right out of the genome and like other marginalized groups, they take the parts that look cool and discard the rest, ignoring our humanity.”

True Biz is the ASL expression that means “real talk.” The book’s cast of spicy characters aren’t sidekicks, they are heroes. Austin is the privileged deaf kid whose family shuns cochlear implants. Kayla is Charlie’s Black roommate who schools the crew on BASL — Black American Sign Language. Eliot, Austin’s roommate, has a chilling secret. And February Waters, River Valley’s head mistress, is a CODA — child of a deaf parent — trying to appease her jealous wife and keep her beloved school open. “Most of the time we see deaf characters as lonely or pitied,” Nović said. “Charlie is gaining her agency. It’s important for people to understand the fullness of the deaf experience.”

“This book has a mission,” said Terence Washington, manager of civic engagement programs at the Free Library. “It’s a good story. I was intrigued with how Sara taught us about the deaf community without being condescending.”

In 2016, Nović, a Columbia MFA alum, published her first novel, Girl at War, the story of a 10-year-old who lives through the Bosnian Wars in Yugoslavia during the 1990s. It took her seven years to write True Biz, her second book, which was published in 2022.

It was a Reese Witherspoon book club pick and was optioned for a limited TV series, starring deaf actress Millicent Simmonds as Charlie. Production has been delayed due to the writers’ strike. But Nović is patient, excited about the number of deaf actors who could potentially get jobs. That’s what being an advocate for the deaf is all about.