Reviewing a memoir by Abigail Heringer, the first deaf contestant on “The Bachelor”
By Joyce Cohen
Vacuous television makes for great television. “The Bachelor” franchise rarely fails to deliver.
Among the mindlessness comes a surprisingly serious, and thoroughly readable, memoir from contestant Abigail Heringer—Bachelor Nation’s first deaf contestant. In “The Deaf Girl”—the memoir’s title is a way of reclaiming how she was always referred to—Heringer details her difficulties as a child with a hearing loss who uses a cochlear implant and, later, as a contestant with a disability on “The Bachelor.”
Heringer didn’t think a reality show was a great way to meet a husband. But she always liked watching and she had been laid off from work, so she applied on a lark.
Her book begins as she’s in the limousine heading to the “Bachelor” mansion, with her fellow contestants chattering away. Amid so much background noise, Heringer writes that she couldn’t understand a word.
Her intro to the designated bachelor, Matt James, was a cheesy line about needing to read his lips. And thankfully, she writes, he had beautiful lips.
Siblings With Hearing Loss
Heringer and her older sister, Rachel, were both born profoundly deaf, the result of two copies of the GJB2 gene, which involves a protein called Connexin 26 that affects potassium in the inner ear.
Rachel failed a hearing screening as a baby. “In an instant, the concrete plans Mom had made for Rachel’s life were cracking,” Heringer writes. “With hearing loss, it isn’t just the ability to hear that a person loses; it’s their ability to speak and understand those around them.... How would she make friends? Or attend school?.... No baby book could prepare her for this.”
Rachel received a cochlear implant at age 2, as did Heringer. But while her older sister took to her implant easily, preferring to use it as much as possible, Heringer struggled. It was a relief to take the implant off, she writes. At one point she tried an implant in her second ear, but abandoned that attempt, finding only robotic feedback and beeping.
As Heringer well knows, people think a cochlear implant replicates typical hearing. Far from it, but it does allow her to communicate somewhat typically, at least in some circumstances.
What was it like to adjust to the implant? Heringer uses a visual example: Imagine confronting a table filled with unfamiliar fruit and being asked to identify an apple.
“Noiselessness is a natural state of being for me,” she writes. “Using my cochlear implant always takes work.”
In high school, one mean girl accused her of using her hearing loss to gain sympathy. In college, another accused her of being rude and standoffish when she couldn’t hear her name being called from far away.
So Heringer realized she had to own her hearing loss. “The more honest I was about my disability, the better people could understand me,” she writes.
Oddly, she liked loud parties—where everyone has trouble hearing—and she didn’t feel out of place. Always, though, Heringer worried whether, and when, to reveal her hearing loss on dates.
Finding Love
The 25th iteration of “The Bachelor” that began airing in January 2021 was a pandemic-plagued season that kept the contestants close to home at Nemacolin Woodlands Resort in rural Pennsylvania, rather than sending them on globe-trotting adventures.
Heringer doesn’t spill too many “Bachelor” secrets. We do learn she was told to pack seven dresses. The producers suggested she shop for bridesmaid dresses—“a little weird,” she writes.
It was also odd rowing across a lake in a large pumpkin, one of the group date activities. She couldn’t risk getting her cochlear implant wet, and so she removed it. Without it, “it was daunting to navigate rowing a pumpkin boat in dead silence,” she writes.
Heringer did receive the mixed blessing of the first-impression rose, though she never forged a meaningful connection with that season’s bachelor, Matt James. There was plenty of boredom amid the drama. It didn’t help that the hotel TV didn’t have closed captioning. The girls spent a lot of time painting one another’s nails.
As it turns out, Heringer was one of the few “Bachelor” franchise successes. She met her husband, Noah Erb, on the spinoff, “Bachelor in Paradise,” which started airing in August 2021. Heringer shares that she and Noah had actually met at a “Bachelor” gathering in New York. They reconnected on “Paradise,” where they broke up during a brief, teary situationship, but only temporarily.
Erb was always an advocate, and “doesn’t disregard my disability,” Heringer writes. She relocated to Tulsa, Oklahoma, Erb’s hometown, and the two were married in October 2024.
Early in the book, Heringer writes about her sister as a toddler, when her hearing loss was recognized. “If Rachel was happy and well- adjusted, then the only thing Mom had to change was her perception. Rachel was happy, and Rachel could not hear. Those two truths could exist in the same universe.” In Heringer’s universe, they do, too.
Joyce Cohen is a journalist in New York City. “The Deaf Girl” is available at bookstores. Follow Abigail Heringer at instagram.com/abigail_heringer.
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A review of a memoir by Abigail Heringer, the first deaf contestant on “The Bachelor”