A review by courtneyfalling
Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body by Rebekah Taussig

emotional hopeful reflective fast-paced

4.0

I think this is one of my favorite disability rights memoirs I've read recently. I started a little suspicious of it
since there's no way her first high school class had no disabled students, and her savior approach rather than considering possible alternate disability experiences in the room would've made me feel so frustrated and vulnerable as a student, and I'm usually off-put by how disability rights appeals frame "temporarily able-bodied" status, like even if you personally never become disabled, you should frickin’ care about disabled people
. But the section an essay or two in where she starts reflecting on making decisions that now fill you with shame and hurt because you literally didn’t have any other model for how to survive… I teared up. That was really well-articulated and made me much more sympathetic to the actual writing. And "I can’t trace where my desires end and my coping mechanisms begin"?!?! OOF this hit me hard and I'm going to have to sit with this for a while. I also liked her take on species adaptability and how working less and more flexibly would benefit us all, and her story about attending a 2017 Women's March with her disability rights sign made me smile a little bit as someone who was a young college student with a homemade collaged sign filled with pictures of powerful disabled women at the same time. 
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