Golem Girl: A Memoir - 'A hymn to life, love, family, and spirit' DAVID MITCHELL

Luminous; a profound portrait of the artist as a young-and mature-woman; an unflinching social history of disability over the last six decades; and a hymn to life, love, family, and spirit - David MitchellLehrer's story is a revelation of an inner subjective life-full of tragedy, love, and creativity-pushing against the external social stigmas, cultural narratives, and prejudices surrounding disability. She admits a felt kinship with other 'monsters' because their bodies were also 'built by human hands', but unlike them, she is her own purpose, her own meaning, her own unstoppable golem - Stephen AsmaWith deft painter's prose, Riva Lehrer helps us discover what it is to be human when others see us as broken. In Golem Girl, Lehrer gives us the gift, at long last, of our own crip beauty - Nicola Griffith, author of HILDRiva Lehrer is a great artist and a great storyteller. This is a brilliant book, full of strangeness, beauty, and wonder - Audrey NiffeneggerVivid . . . unforgettable . . . It is the story of how someone who is fundamentally different made not a life that transcends that difference, but a life that lionizes it. This book expands our notion of what constitutes the human experience, and it does so with generosity and open-heartedness - Andrew SolomonThis searing personal history expands Lehrer's project of looking at our bodies inside and out, in all their queerness, fragility, and strength, into a stunning new dimension - Alison BechdelNot your typical memoir about 'what it's like to be disabled in a non-disabled world . . . Lehrer tells her stories about becoming the monster she was always meant to be: glorious, defiant, unbound, and voracious. Read it! - Alice Wong, founder and director, Disability Visibility ProjectOy, what a story: Job, eat your heart out! In Riva Lehrer's life chronicle, an appalling fate (and I don't just mean the circumstances of her birth) gets visited upon an invincible character, and the result is a wincing-wise tale, by turns harrowing and hilarious, cut clean through with flecks of grace and beauty. Lehrer is one wry mensch, and an extraordinary kinstler to boot - Lawrence Weschler