$9.95

List price: 23.95

You save: $14.00

HARDCOVER, USED

Ships in 1 to 3 days

Qty	Store	Section
1	Local Warehouse	Health and Medicine- Medical Biographies
Hide store locations

More copies of this ISBN:

This title in other formats:

Poster Child: A Memoir

by Emily Rapp

Poster Child: A Memoir Cover

About This Book

Synopses & Reviews

Customer Comments (1)

Comment on this title and you could win free books!

More Books by Emily Rapp

ISBN13: 9781596912564
ISBN10: 1596912561
Condition: Standard
Dustjacket: Standard
All Product Details

Only 1 left in stock at $9.95!

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

In the tradition of Autobiography of a Face, a gorgeously-written memoir about growing up with a transfiguring disability, by a young writer of uncommon talent.

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.

Review:

"Rapp, a writing professor at Antioch University, has crafted a meditative, nuanced account of her life, which began with a grim prognosis after she was born in 1974 with a shortened leg. At first, her handicap is filtered through the prismatic fantasy of girlhood. 'I felt singled out and special,' she reflects, spinning stories of dragon attacks to enthralled schoolmates in Nebraska and Wyoming. In a childhood marked by surgeries and prosthetic fittings, she becomes a bubbly poster child for the local March of Dimes. As the daughter of a pastor and fiercely optimistic parents, Rapp prays earnestly for a normal leg even as she feverishly overcompensates for the artificial limb through witty verve and rambunctious horseplay. But in adolescence, she struggles with her image in the eyes of others. Her leg 'may have been couture,' she jokes, 'but it certainly wasn't fashionable.' Rapp's unrelenting push toward normalcy even takes her to Korea as a Fulbright scholar, where she must fend for herself even with a few hydraulic malfunctions. But she's too sharp and self-aware to either laugh her travails away or admit total defeat. Though she demonstrates daunting reserves of pluck, she isn't afraid to hold the sugarcoating and confront the irresolvable dilemmas. Her piercing metaphors and sudden, unexpected jabs of humor enhance the candid appeal of this 'underdog' tale." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Review:

"You can't put down this excellent memoir from a young woman born to live with an artificial leg, and I don't know exactly why. The basest reason: morbid curiosity on the part of the reader. The common-sense reason: originality of the material — outside of Janet Sternberg's 'Phantom Limb,' I can't think of another work organized around a series of prostheses. Or the noblest reason: 'Poster Child'... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) beautifully illustrates every human being's sometimes overt, sometimes covert struggle against the intractability of our own physical condition. We are born, screaming our lungs out, in a mess of blood. We tidy up for a while, but our bodies are always with us — sweating, excreting, hurting, dying for a drink, then finally just plain dying. All the jewelry, perfume, fast cars or corner offices in the world can't ameliorate those facts. We ignore our physicality as much as we can, tell stories about eternal life, the immortality of great art or brave deeds, but our bodies still itch and ache and give the raspberry to our very best intentions.

Emily Rapp was born with a condition called proximal focal femoral deficiency (PFFD), which means that one of her legs was shorter than the other. The Rapp family life slipped at once from a fragile semblance of normality to absurd street theater. The baby's paternal grandmother began to wail when she heard the news, taking it as God's punishment for her having had Emily's father out of wedlock years before. A nurse piped up when she heard the news and opined, 'We just don't know what God is going to do,' which was particularly impertinent considering that Emily's father was a Lutheran minister. Another nurse thought baby Emily might someday have trouble breast-feeding, which Emily's mother, a nurse herself, thought misguided in the extreme. Whatever the circumstances, the Rapp family machinery had been yanked by a major monkey wrench. Nothing, as people like to say, would ever be the same for them again.

Residing first in Wyoming, then in Nebraska, the family had to think of ways to address this medical problem. Their doctor was not a big-city hotshot, nor did the Rapps have money to burn. Their daughter's condition was obscure and under-researched. From very early childhood, she endured difficult surgeries, strange bandages, body casts from operations that failed and had to be performed again. Her brother Andy was pushed from the center of attention. Her father had to keep ministering to the spiritually needy. Her mother was forced to work long hours in bad nursing positions. When Rapp was about 4, she underwent a series of operations that (as I understand it) realigned her leg bone with her hip and removed her left foot. She was then fitted with an awkward wooden leg, the first of an uncomfortable many.

Here's how she dealt with it. In 1980, when she was only 6, Rapp writes, 'I was chosen as the March of Dimes poster child for the Medicine Bow chapter of Albany County, Wyoming. ... There were posters of me on the walls of Slade Elementary School. I attended luncheons at the Chamber of Commerce; I joined the Handicapped Ski Program in Winter Park, Colorado; I visited the governor in his Cheyenne mansion.' The irony that she was speaking out against birth defects while sporting one herself was entirely lost on her. She was only 6, and she'd already lived through a lifetime of physical hell. 'People told me, "You're such an inspiration," and, "You're so brave,"' she writes. 'I believed them. I thought that as long as I was inspiring and fantastic, as long as I compensated for the missing leg by being smart, cute, intelligent, and fun, I would have a normal life. I would survive in the world. I even thought, for a long time, that it would be easy.'

Ideal American feminine beauty is, as we know, a very strange thing. By nature, the look can never last for long. (Even Paris Hilton's nose runs when she has a cold.) But out in Laramie, Rapp embarked upon the elusive project of achieving perfect beauty. She would romance the crowd; she would pass as normal, only more so; gorgeous, only more so. No matter that she had bad eyesight, crooked teeth and a series of legs that dragged and twisted and leaked oil when their hinges acted up. She would do it.

She dieted. She skied. She wore contacts. She skated. She danced. She sang. She used up quarts of hair spray. Her parents loved her dearly, but (with their tacit permission) she turned into a spoiled, demanding prima donna, a selfish little brat. Her big brother was long-suffering, her parents exhausted. The expenses for her series of artificial legs drained the family finances. But she was popular. She was liked. She was darling. (Except for once, when she was still a little girl, when a classmate mocked her by walking like an ape and calling her 'crippled.' And when a mean little boy named Brian called her 'Peg leg' on the day of her first Communion.)

With adolescence came new questions. Would she lose her faith or keep it? What about love? Would she wear her leg during sex or take it off? How much can you bear to reveal yourself when, in a sense, everyone knows so much about you already?

If you feel like it, dear reader, put down your morning paper, get up and go to the mirror. How much do you currently resemble Cameron Diaz or Johnny Depp? What do you do in your own life to make up the difference? Does it work? Emily Rapp, not yet 35 and now a professor in the MFA program at Antioch University, has tried almost everything to come to terms with her leg. Sports, scholarship, God, no God, God again, travel, a breakdown, a recovery and, now, this book. She seems to want us to know that she genuinely is a poster child, an emblem of all our base, or original, or even noble behavior — of our never-ending struggle against the vexations of the flesh, a struggle we're all bound to lose.

" Reviewed by Carolyn See, who may be reached at www.carolynsee.com, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)

Review:

"This should not be viewed only as a disability memoir. It is also a spiritual memoir of the movement from childhood pieties to adult faith and a confession that will resonate with anyone who spent their youth overcompensating, for whatever reason. Rapp has excelled again: This book is a blessing." Kirkus Reviews

Review:

"Young adults, often obsessed with defects both real and imagined, will identify with the author's need at first to be extraordinary, and then her final acceptance of the imperfect, but valued person she really is." School Library Journal

About the Author

Emily Rapp was born in Nebraska and grew up in Wyoming and Colorado. She was a Fulbright Scholar and a James A. Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. She has received awards and recognition for her work from The Atlantic Monthly, StoryQuarterly, The Mary Roberts Rinehart foundation, the Jentel Arts Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She was recently the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University. She is a professor in the MFA Program at Antioch University in Los Angeles.

What Our Readers Are Saying

Add a comment for a chance to win!

Average customer rating based on 1 comment:

: ridermae, March 14, 2007 (view all comments by ridermae)
Pick this book up and it will be difficult to put it down. This is a strong memoir, and one in which I felt like I'd learned a lot, which is something you might not be able to say about some memoirs (you may learn a lot emotionally, or not, but I felt as though I learned a lot on many levels with Poster Child: in terms of writing, in terms of physicality and embodiment, with dashes of theology and splashes of the technical writing that Emily seemed to wield effortlessly whenever it was needed in the narrative to explain things biological or physiological or just how mechanisms work that aid movement and mobility). Looking forward to where Emily Rapp goes next!

Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No
(10 of 18 readers found this comment helpful)

report this comment

Product Details

ISBN:: 9781596912564
Subtitle:: A Memoir
Author:: Rapp, Emily
Publisher:: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Subject:: General
Subject:: Literary
Subject:: Women
Subject:: Patients
Subject:: Abnormalities
Subject:: Personal Memoirs
Subject:: General Biography
Publication Date:: January 2007
Binding:: Hardcover
Language:: English
Pages:: 229
Dimensions:: 8.30x6.34x.85 in. .83 lbs.

Find related books in:

Section	-	Aisle
Biography	-	General
Health and Medicine	-	Disability
Health and Medicine	-	Medical Biographies
Used Books	-	Biography
Used Books	-	Health and Medicine

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE...

RELATED AISLES

More copies of this ISBN:

This title in other formats:

About This Book

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Review:

Review:

Review:

Review:

About the Author

What Our Readers Are Saying

Add a comment for a chance to win!

Average customer rating based on 1 comment:

Product Details

Find related books in: