Poster Child - by Emily Rapp (Paperback)

About the Book

Book 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, had lost most of her leg, from just above the knee, and had become the smiling, indefatigable "poster child" for the March of Dimes. For years she made appearances at church suppers and rodeos, giving pep talks about how normal and happy she was. All the while she was learning to live with what she later described as "my grievous, irrevocable flaw," and the paradox that being extraordinary was the only way to be ordinary.

Praise for Poster Child:

"Rapp's precise and forthright descriptions of her exhausting physical ordeals and complex psychic wounds are simultaneously harrowing and fascinating, and they foster a strong bond between writer and reader...Rapp approaches the memoir as a supple, revelatory, involving and generous genre....She offers a fresh perspective on our obsession with physical perfection, especially the crushing expectations for women, and she writes delicately about the fears that disability engenders regarding intimacy and sex. Rapp's insider's view of the history of prostheses deepens our empathy and admiration for those who depend on artificial limbs, a growing population, once again, in yet another time of war and horrific injuries. Memoir, the conduit from the personal to the universal, is the surest way into the kind of significant psychological, sociological and spiritual truth Rapp is engaged in articulating. And there isn't one false note here. Not one inauthentic moment. No cheap manipulation. No self-importance...Her cauterizing specificity is compelling, her candor incandescent and her intelligence, courage and spiritual diligence stupendous."-Donna Seaman, Los Angeles Times
"You can't put down this excellent memoir ...Poster Child beautifully illustrates every human being's sometimes overt, sometimes co

Review Quotes

"Poster Child is memoir at its finest. Emily Rapp has crafted a book that's both descriptive and reflective, poignant yet never self-indulgent, with a breathtaking final scene. I point to this book in nonfiction classes now and tell students, "This! This is what you should aspire to!" --Hope Edelman, author of Motherless Daughters

"[Rapp's] cauterizing specificity is compelling, her candor incandescent and her intelligence, courage and spiritual diligence stupendous...measured and resonant...there isn't one false note here." --Donna Seaman, Los Angeles Times

"You can't put down this excellent memoir...Poster Child beautifully illustrates every human being's sometimes overt, sometimes covert struggle against the intractability of our own physical condition." --Carolyn See, Washington Post

"Honest and perceptive...Focusing on the challenges she faced as a girl, and later as a young woman, with an artificial leg, the memoir is revelatory and emotional, truthful and empathetic. " --Christina Eng, San Francisco Chronicle

"Mature and graceful...this book is a blessing." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Emily Rapp brilliantly succeeds at communicating the pain, shame and profound strangeness she experienced as a young amputee. [She] writes breathtakingly, almost magically, of the world of wooden legs, silicone feet and metal knee hinges that are made in a filthy workshop by a man who has no soap in his bathroom and dying plants in his waiting room." --Donna Minkowitz, Newsday

"The best memoirs tell great stories uncovering the nuances of a life and the sometimes extraordinary situations that make it unique. They delve deep into the author's psyche sharing life's unpredictable, painful, and sometimes joyful, moments. Emily Rapp's riveting Poster Child is one such book...Thanks to Rapp's honest, straightforward confessions, we come a little closer to walking in her shoes." --Mary Houlihan, Chicago Sun-Times

"Everything about Emily is uniquely wonderful: Her memory; her story; her voice; her human insights; her endless strength, honesty and grace; her pitch-perfect prose. My only criticism with this book is that it ended." --Amy Krouse Rosenthal, author of Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life

"With a voice as refreshing as spiked lemon ice, authentic, feisty and tender, Poster Child connects us to an unflinching American family and to a guileless young woman who tells her emerging story with luminous self-command. At every quarter turn we follow the narrator's transformations from her first tentative steps and into glittering prisms of personal challenge and explosive discovery. A triumph of warmth, wit, and a fiercely lyric psyche." --Maria Flook, author of Invisible Eden and My Sister Life

"Emily Rapp tells a revealing and believable story of physical endurance, a fierce will, and the devotion of a remarkable family. Some difficult things in life can never be solved however hard we try, and Emily Rapp's memoir details her congenital defect and the ensuing medical ordeals. Graced with many gifts--intelligence, beauty, and spirit--Emily Rapp's greatest achievement is to help us understand what it really means to be a whole person." --Laura Furman, author of Drinking with the Cook and series editor of The O.Henry Prize Stories

"The pain of endless surgeries, the fear of never being loved, the longing to be whole in a culture ruled by a heartless obsession with physical perfection. These emotions underlie Emily Rapp's wonderful book, but they don't define it. Poster Child is too much fun to read, too rich with hard-headed detail about everything from the terrors of miniskirts to the mechanics of artificial limbs, to be mistaken for a woeful tale of disability. Here is what it is like to have a daring mind, a full heart--and one leg." --Stephen Harrigan, author of Challenger Park

About the Author

A former Fulbright scholarship recipient, Emily Rapp has received numerous awards and recognition for her work, including from the Atlantic Monthly, StoryQuarterly, and the Corporation of Yaddo. In 2006 she was the Philip Roth Writerin- Residence at Bucknell University. She is currently a professor in the M.F.A. program at Antioch University Los Angeles.