Golem Girl
A Memoir - 'A hymn to life, love, family, and spirit' DAVID MITCHELL
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- 27,99 zł
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- 27,99 zł
Publisher Description
'A hymn to life, love, family, and spirit' DAVID MITCHELL, author of Cloud Atlas
The vividly told, gloriously illustrated memoir of an artist born with disabilities who searches for freedom and connection in a society afraid of strange bodies.
***WINNER OF THE BARBELLION PRIZE***
In 1958, amongst the children born with spina bifida is Riva Lehrer. She endures endless medical procedures and is told she will never have a job, a romantic relationship or an independent life. But everything changes when as an adult Riva is invited to join a group of artists, writers, and performers who are building Disability Culture. Their work is daring, edgy, funny, and dark, and it rejects tropes that define disabled people as pathetic, frightening or worthless, instead insisting that disability is an opportunity for creativity and resistance. Riva begins to paint their portraits - and her art begins to transform the myths she's been told her whole life about her body, her sexuality, and other measures of normal.
'A brilliant book, full of strangeness, beauty, and wonder' Audrey Niffenegger
'Wonderful. An ode to art and the beauty of disability' Cerrie Burnell
'Stunning' Alison Bechdel
***SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD***
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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. Born in 1958, Lehrer was among the first to benefit from a surgical breakthrough that enabled doctors to save the lives of newborns with her condition. In the book's first half, Lehrer recounts finding uninhibited joy with other disabled children at Cincinnati's Condon School, as well as some unnecessary and ultimately harmful medical procedures she endured. At 21 and living in Chicago, she discovered an exuberant sexuality one she believed wasn't possible for her and grappled with feeling marginalized due to her queerness. The book's second half, however, loses some of the intimacy as Lehrer adopts a more didactic tone to describe a succession of relationships and document the rise of her career as an artist and the way her work explores the intersections of gender, sexuality, and disability (she includes photos and her own illustrations throughout). Lehrer notes that "international debates (such as those in Belgium and the Netherlands) persist over whether to treat infants like me at all," and observes that "disability is the great billboard of human truth.... Add it to any discourse, and we can see what humanity truly values." Readers will be sucked into Lehrer's powerful memoir.
