Poster Child: A Memoir - Hardcover

Rapp, Emily

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1596912561 ISBN 13: 9781596912564

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2006

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

Reviews

Adult/High School—Rapp was an extraordinary child. Born with a congenital defect, she had her left ankle amputated at the age of four. Four years later, after dozens of surgeries, her entire leg below the knee was gone. Her parents—a Lutheran minister and a nurse—told her she could be anything she wanted. And she tried and reveled in the attention. She became the March of Dimes poster child, an amputee skier, and eventually won a Fulbright Scholarship to Korea. But this is not the story of her achievements. Instead, the book chronicles her poignant journey to make peace with her flaws. In exquisite prose and with keen self-awareness, Rapp imagines how her parents must have reacted to the child born with a deformed leg, the extremes they went to so that she could feel "normal," how much she loved being a poster child, and the church ladies' gifts and visits during her various surgeries. And then came her slow realization that what children had called her—"a cripple" and "peg leg"—was true and she didn't need to do it all. At book's end, Rapp and her parents find a box filled with every prosthetic device she ever wore, from a brace as a toddler to each new artificial limb as she grew to adulthood. It is an illuminating moment in her struggle to accept her disability. 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.—Pat Bangs, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1596912561
• ISBN 13: 9781596912564
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240