Jelly, Baby: Essays on Disability and Vulnerability by Therese Estacion

In this revelatory collection of lyrical and poetic essays, Therese Estacion explores vital themes relating to her life as a disabled person.

Defying genre and constraint, Estacion conveys how ableism has impacted her disposition and self-esteem. She also confronts her own internalized ableism and unpacks how she has come to terms with disability in all its complexity.

Jelly, Baby fearlessly uncovers the trauma, grief, and rage inherent to the struggle to accept one’s own vulnerability and reach a place of love. Inspired by Estacion’s psychotherapy training, this book is a tender examination of some of the most vulnerable aspects of the self, and a head-on challenge of self-loathing. The result is a beautiful and astute meditation on ableism and a transformative journey deep into the psyche.

Praise for Jelly, Baby: Essays on Disability and Vulnerability

“A poetic manifesto, both funny and furious, substantiating that the personal is political and the mythical is, too. In lucid and pithy vignettes that build upon each other toward revelation, Jelly, Baby speaks truth to power. Estacion’s emergent body of work is a singular force in Canlit.” —Tamara Faith Berger, author of Yara

“Jelly, Baby is that rarest of books—one that condenses all the grief and rage of the world into a perfect diamond. Therese Estacion shines the harshest of light into her life, and in so doing refracts back to all of us the way that the world leaves the disabled body in shadow. But to say that there is no love here would also be wrong, for there is love in spades—relentless, uncompromising love for the self that won’t let go. In the conversation that unspools here, between the body that-once-was and the body-that-is-and-will-be, Estacion charts a path through grief for anyone who listens, reminding us that the ability to dream—and to love, and imagine—comes with us everywhere, moving us forward, forever, into new possibility.” —Amanda Leduc, author of Wild Life

“In Jelly, Baby, Therese Estacion opens a space for readers to bear witness to a strikingly full range of her humanity. Through poetic essays, acute memory, and vivid dreaming, she reminds us that it is impossible to arrive at personal truth without moving through shadows. Jelly, Baby offers a unique gift: the admission that our grief, rage, and searing desire bring us into deep and necessary moments of reckoning with our humanity.” —Brandon Wint, author of Divine Animal

Press Coverage

2026 Spring Preview: Nonfiction —Quill & Quire

Most Anticipated: Our 2026 Nonfiction Spring Preview —49th Shelf

“[A]n important contribution to a new era: books written by and for disabled people, where non-disabled readers are a welcome, but rightfully a secondary, audience.” —Dorothy Ellen Palmer, Quill & Quire