Poster ChildPoster Child
Poster Child, Rapp's memoir of the first thirty years of her life with disability, is an unflinchingly honest and often darkly humorous account of coming to terms - however uneasily - with an unconventional body. As a teenager she wrestles with the tyranny of self-image. In college, she agonizes over how to achieve intimacy with a man when removing her leg only created "a body in two pieces," the farthest thing from love she could imagine. After traveling the world, she comes to see how for so many years she had been living "as a willing stranger in the country of my own body," and finally, tenuously, achieves thte gift of acceptance. Poster Child exposes the emotional impact of feeling the shape and limits of one's own body and illustrates with grace the all-too-human struggle between mind and body that so many of us - whether disabled or not - experience.
Emily Rapp was born with a congenital defect that required, at the age of four, that her left foot be amputated. By the time she was eight she’d had dozens of operations and her entire leg below the knee had been amputated. She had also become the smiling, always perky, indefatigable poster child for the March of Dimes, and spent much of her childhood traveling around the Midwest making appearances and giving pep talks. All the while she was learning to live with what she called “my grievous, irrevocable flaw,” and the paradox that being extraordinary was the only way to be ordinary.
Poster Child is Rapp’s unflinching, brutally honest and often darkly humorous account of wrestling with the tyranny of self-image as a teenager and then ultimately coming to terms with her own body as a young woman. It’s about what it’s like to live inside a broken body in a society that values beauty above almost everything else.
Emily Rapp was born with a congenital defect that required, at the age of four, that her left foot be amputated. By the time she was eight she'd had dozens of operations and her entire leg below the knee had been amputated. She had also become the smiling, always perky, indefatigable poster child for the March of Dimes, and spent much of her childhood traveling around the Midwest making appearances and giving pep talks. All the while she was learning to live with what she called "my grievous, irrevocable flaw," and the paradox that being extraordinary was the only way to be ordinary.
Poster Child is Rapp's unflinching, brutally honest and often darkly humorous account of wrestling with the tyranny of self-image as a teenager and then ultimately coming to terms with her own body as a young woman. It's about what it's like to live inside a broken body in a society that values beauty above almost everything else.
Emily Rapp was born with a birth defect that required, at the age of four, that her left foot be amputated. By the time she was eight she'd had dozens of operations and had lost her entire leg from just above the knee. She had also become the smiling, always perky, indefatigable poster child for the March of Dimes, and spent much of her childhood traveling around Wyoming making appearances and giving pep talks. All the while she was learning to live with what she later called "my grievous, irrevocable flaw." This is Rapp's brutally honest and often darkly humorous account of wrestling with the tyranny of self-image as a teenager and then ultimately coming to terms with her own body as a young woman. It's about what it's like to live inside a broken body in a society that values beauty above almost everything else.--From publisher description.
In an unflinching memoir, a young woman who grew up with a disability that forced the childhood amputation of her entire leg below the knee details her struggle to learn to live with the problem, her role as a poster child for the March of Dimes, dealing with her teenage self-image, and the ultimate coming to terms with her body in a society that values beauty. 50,000 first printing.
A young woman who grew up with a disability that forced the childhood amputation of her leg below the knee details her struggle to learn to live with the problem, her role as a poster child for the March of Dimes, and dealing with her self-image.
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- New York : Bloomsbury, 2007., New York : Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers.
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