The standard charge activists and scholars make against disability autobiographies is that they reinforce cultural stereotypes and hinder social change. These texts, such critics argue, perpetuate the notion that disability is a personal tragedy that happens to an individual rather than a set of cultural structures and practices that affect many individuals. As a writer and reader of disability autobiography, I believe it is possible to use one's personal experiences to comment on the culture one inhabits. I do not intend here, however, to defend or condemn specific authors or works or to debate the value of these texts as a facet of a social-change movement. I offer instead an impressionistic account of a course on disability autobiography that I taught at Berkeley recently. What stands out in my memory of the course has to do less with students' responses to particular texts and more with interactions among the students or between the students and me that often seemed peripheral to the topic at hand. This is, then, an autobiographical essay, a series of vignettes and portraits, rendered in all the randomness of lived experience. But it will, I hope, raise issues that are central to disability activism and disability studies.