Rebekah Taussig

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courtesy Rebekah Taussig

Rebekah Taussig in a wheelchair in front of a mural of strawberries.

Rebekah Taussig

This year’s UW Go Big Read selection is Sitting Pretty: The View From My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body, a compulsively readable memoir by Rebekah Taussig. Growing up, Taussig saw few role models; chapter by chapter, her book opens up creative and boundary-breaking ways of living for those who are differently abled and ways of understanding for everyone. CART captioning and ASL interpretation available.

media release: Presented in partnership with Go Big Read.

Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the '90s and early 2000s, Rebekah Taussig only saw disability depicted as something monstrous (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), inspirational (Helen Keller), or angelic (Forrest Gump). None of this felt right; and as she got older, she longed for more stories that allowed disability to be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and fulfilling.

Writing about the rhythms and textures of what it means to live in a body that doesn’t fit, Rebekah reflects on everything from the complications of kindness and charity, living both independently and dependently, experiencing intimacy, and how the pervasiveness of ableism in our everyday media directly translates to everyday life.

Disability affects all of us, directly or indirectly, at one point or another. By exploring this truth in poignant and lyrical essays, Taussig illustrates the need for more stories and more voices to understand the diversity of humanity. Sitting Pretty challenges us as a society to be patient and vigilant, practical and imaginative, kind and relentless, as we set to work to write an entirely different story.