Sitting Pretty: The View From My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body
Paperback OUT NOW!
From disability advocate and creator of the Instagram account @sitting_pretty comes a beautiful, nuanced portrait of a body that looks and moves differently than most.
Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early 2000s, Rebekah Taussig only saw disability depicted as something monstrous (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), inspirational (Helen Keller), or angelic (Forrest Gump). None of this felt right; and as she got older, she longed for more stories that allowed disability to be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and fulfilling.
Writing about the rhythms and textures of what it means to live in a body that doesn’t fit, Rebekah reflects on everything from the complications of kindness and charity, living both independently and dependently, experiencing intimacy, and how the pervasiveness of ableism in our everyday media directly translates to everyday life.
Disability affects all of us, directly or indirectly, at one point or another. By exploring this truth in poignant and lyrical essays, Taussig illustrates the need for more stories and more voices to understand the diversity of humanity. Sitting Pretty challenges us as a society to be patient and vigilant, practical and imaginative, kind and relentless, as we set to work to write an entirely different story.
About the Author
REBEKAH TAUSSIG, PH.D. is a Kansas City writer and teacher with her doctorate in Creative Nonfiction and Disability Studies. She has led workshops and presentations at the University of Michigan, University of Kansas, and Davidson College on disability representation, identity, and community. She also runs the Instagram platform @sitting_pretty where she crafts “mini-memoirs” to contribute nuance to the collective narratives being told about disability in our culture. She lives in a tiny, old house with her fussy family of tender-hearted snugglers.
ALSO!
We are partnering with Reader to Reader to donate copies of Sitting Pretty to underfunded libraries across the U.S. that are in need of books that share diverse perspectives. To be a part of the campaign, order a book through Amazon Smile directly to Reader to Reader—just select Tracy Carr/MS Library Commission as the ship-to address. From there, Reader to Reader will make sure Sitting Pretty is accessible to anyone who wants to read Rebekah’s story!
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Rebekah Taussig 