The Book

Sitting Pretty: The View From My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body
by Rebekah Taussig

Growing up as a paralyzed girl in the 1990s and early 2000s, Rebekah Taussig rarely encountered complex depictions of disability. The stories told on screens, through ads, and in magazine pictures all centered around a particular kind of body and perspective – one that pushed all others to the margins. Through education and getting to know the disabled community, she found the stories that she’d hungered for as a child. She knew she wanted to recreate that transformation for others, combating the erasure of disability stories and allowing people to dream of a new world with more ease, more creativity, and more flexibility and resilience.

Sitting Pretty processes a lifetime of memories to paint a beautiful, nuanced portrait of a body that looks and moves differently than most. Through a series of thoughtful, conversational essays, Taussig interrogates conceptions of kindness and charity, dependence and independence. She grapples with the myth of ableism and the concept of feminism, chronicles the impossibilities of finding accessible affordable housing, and celebrates the many dimensions of an identity formed through community, self-exploration, affinity, and partnership.

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