Me Before You: Disability-Informed Reading Guide

Me Before You: Disability Informed Reading Guide PDF

Many commonly taught books and stories that feature disabled characters and/or themes related to disability include portrayals that can be confusing, stereotyped, or unintentionally harmful. Our Disability-Informed Reading Guides help educators navigate these texts with care. These resources are not endorsements of the books themselves, but tools to support thoughtful conversations, offer important context, and encourage more inclusive, accurate discussions about disability. Like all of our resources, they’re designed to help classrooms be places where all students feel respected and represented.

Me Before You is a 2012 novel by Jojo Moyes. It became a bestseller and was adapted into a widely marketed feature film released in 2016, with Moyes co-writing the screenplay. The story follows Louisa Clark, hired to care for Will Traynor, a wealthy man who becomes quadriplegic after a traffic accident, and it ends with Will traveling to Switzerland to die by assisted suicide. When the film was released, disabled activists protested at the London premiere in May 2016 and mounted a wider public campaign, including the #MeBeforeEuthanasia effort, objecting to a plot that presents a disabled man's death as the emotionally satisfying resolution.

The book remains popular and is often recommended as romance, which is precisely why students are likely to meet it without any framing that acknowledges the criticism. A reading guide is useful here because the book's appeal and its problems are tightly bound together.