Personal narratives have been considered one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims across the world (Schaffer and Smith 1). It is my contention that they have played a major role in a renewed perception of disability in contemporary culture, a new thinking that claims that there is no pity or tragedy in disability; rather, it is society’s myths, fears, and stereotypes that most make being disabled difficult, and thus serve as obstacles in the advancement of disability rights. The question addressed in this article is how personal narratives exert a specific social mediation. In this critical context, I aim to analyze the different ways to elicit narrative empathy, mainly through the choice of autobiographical genre, with its characteristic self-reflexivity, as well as the representation of emotional responses. I will analyze two of the earliest disability memoirs, namely Robert Murphy’s The Body Silent (1987) and Reynolds Price’s A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing (1994), in order to see how these academics wrote about their lives to influence the way their readers perceive and understand illness and disability.