A Simpsonville author will be sharing her story and her first novel at a Greer book festival on Oct. 18.
Lori Schur released her book “What Happened to Normal?” back in June of this year. The novel follows a mother whose son is diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, and her whole family’s life suddenly changed.
While a fictional story, “What Happened to Normal?” is heavily inspired by Schur’s lived experience. Her son was diagnosed with type 1 in 2009, when he was eight years old. With no history of the disease in either of their families, Schur and her husband were left to learn a whole new world to help support their child.
“Our lives were just turned upside down,” Schur said. “... The weight of that responsibility and the fear of a misstep was tremendous in the beginning.”
Schur says she wrote her book as a way to give hope to parents of a child diagnosed with a chronic condition. She says that the feeling of isolation was one of the most difficult parts of the diagnosis experience, a feeling she hopes to alleviate for her readers.
“My friends were trying to be supportive, but they didn't really understand how significantly our lives had changed, and some of them were fearful, so they pulled away,” Schur said. “So not only were we adjusting to this new diagnosis, we were adjusting to a change in our social group.”
While the narrative is based around type 1 diabetes, and this is the diagnosis that impacted Schur’s family, Schur says that she wrote the book to be helpful for anyone experiencing a life-altering diagnosis. Parts of the novel are also inspired by things she had observed in other families’ diagnostic journeys.
Schur started to become involved in the type one community the moment her son was diagnosed. She currently serves as president of the South Carolina chapter of Breakthrough T1D, an organization that raised money for type 1 research.
In the 16 years she has been involved, she has also served as a mentor for families receiving this diagnosis for the first time.
“I noticed that there was a common thread to everybody's story. Everybody was dealing with the same situations and the same emotions, and they didn't always have people that they could relate to or talk to about it,” Schur said. “So I wanted to write the book to raise awareness, but also to validate the parent experience.”
While she says the year and a half she spent writing was a tedious process — one that brought up plenty of difficult memories — she feels grateful to be able to allow families to feel seen.
“I had people reach out to me who had never had anybody understand what they were going through [before]. I've had people outside of the type 1 community who have reached out and said that they found the story very relevant for their lives,” Schur said. “That for me was the most rewarding thing.”
Schur will be at the Fall Book Festival hosted by Creative Slingers of Ink on Oct. 18, with plenty of copies of her book. The event is from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Historic Greer Depot. “What Happened to Normal?” is available for purchase on Amazon.
Follow Breanna Laws on X @GreerByBreanna
