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Top of the pile
83
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
86/100Critics
81/100Scholars
Author:
Riva Lehrer
Publisher:
One World
Date:
October 6, 2020
What do we sacrifice in the pursuit of normalcy? And what becomes possible when we embrace monstrosity? Can we envision a world that sees impossible creatures? In 1958, amongst the children born with spina bifida is Riva Lehrer. At the time, most such children are not expected to survive. Her parents and doctors are determined to fix her, sending the message over and over again that she is broken. Everything changes when, as an adult, Riva is invited to join a group of artists, writers, and performers who are building Disability Culture. This memoir invites us to stretch ourselves toward a world where bodies flow between all possible forms of what it is to be human.
What The Reviewers Say
As so-called monsters and frequent heroes, golems illustrate the terror and the promise of embodied life, and as the governing metaphor for artist and professor Riva Lehrer’s penetrating and razor-witted debut, Golem Girl,.
An artist born with spina bifida shares her story and her paintings with grace and humor.
Painter Lehrer applies the same unflinching gaze for which her portraits are known to a lifetime with spina bifida in this trenchant debut memoir of disability and queer culture.
