Description
Book SynopsisFrida Kahlo was an amputee in the last part of her life, but long before that her right leg had been compromised by a childhood bout with polio. Since adolescence, Emily Rapp, herself an amputee since the age of four, felt that there were many things she had in common with Frida Kahlo. From the first sight of Kahlo's painting of the devastating bus crash that almost killed her, Rapp felt a sense of kinship with the artist. They both endured numerous operations; both alternately hid and revealed their altered bodies; and both found a way to live and create despite physical and emotional pain.
In this riveting read, Rapp gets to the essence of Kahlo through her art, her letters, and her diaries. Rapp tells her own story of losing a child to Tay-Sachs; finding love, and becoming pregnant with her daughter; and of how Kahlo's life and work helped her to find a way forward when all seemed lost.
Containing several full-color images of Kahlo's art and clothing, Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg offers a unique perspective on the artist and the challenges she faced.
I want to know and remember what it was like to walk as Frida once walked: before polio at six years old shrunk her right leg; before the infamous bus crash on September 17, 1925 when the pole pierced her pelvis; then the casts, the saws, the stitches woven into the skin and then carefully twisted out, the scars gone white and silent and sealed. I am one-legged, like Frida, but I am also unlike her, and there in our essential difference is where my fascination lies, and there lies also my devotion, my despair, my revulsion, my resentment, my desire.
Trade Review“This book is a wild masterpiece. It is about everything that matters: mortality, motherhood, desire, love, the body, art, writing, survival. Remarkably, the author is able to express the chaos of grief and anger without ever losing control. The fire of Frida Kahlo’s spirit courses through this book and twins with the author’s own attempts to understand her life, and survive. It is brilliant, furious, funny, gorgeously written, terribly sad and, without being sentimental, hopeful. I am sure that any feeling being will love and treasure this generous, remarkable book.” —Matthew Zapruder, author of
Why Poetry and
Father’s Day “With endless intellect and intimacy, Emily Rapp Black brings us a book without parallel, a book that will become well-worn by readers who have passed it on, saying,
here, you have to read this. In
Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg, Rapp Black scours and thinks and confides not in order to write an impossibly original work of art, though she has, but to survive all that has threatened her body and soul. Is it peculiar, then, to say that Frida Kahlo is one of the great loves of her life? For this is the story, and this is the bond between two artists in whom there is no hiding, just expressive, salvific brilliance.
Read this. This book might just get you through.” —Katie Ford, poet and author of
If You Have to Go and
Blood Lyrics
