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Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg
A New York Times-bestselling author's personal examination of how the experiences, art, and disabilities of Frida Kahlo shaped her life as an amputee.
Frida Kahlo was an amputee in the last part of her life, and long before that her right leg was forever 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 Frida Kahlo through her art, her letters and her diaries. She 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 colour images of Kahlo's art and clothing, Rapp 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." --Emily Rapp
Frida Kahlo was an amputee in the last part of her life, and long before that her right leg was forever 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 Frida Kahlo through her art, her letters and her diaries. She 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 colour images of Kahlo's art and clothing, Rapp 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." --Emily Rapp
160 pages, Hardcover
First published June 15, 2021
33 people are currently reading
982 people want to read
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Emily Rapp Black
5 books38 followersAdditional books and editions on Goodreads under the name Emily Rapp.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 38 reviews
July 14, 2021
"Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg" is an essay collection that follows two female artists for whom "create or die” and “laugh or die” are important mottos. These artists, Frida Kahlo (dead painter) and Emily Rapp Black (living writer), who experience their share of romantic heartache, know that art is survival, especially after “a crucible experience” or several—for Kahlo: polio, a “philandering husband,” miscarriages, and a street car crash that is followed by thirty-two operations, including one that leaves her an amputee. For Rapp-Black: five surgeries during her childhood (a birth defect requires that, at the age of four, her left leg, referenced in the title, be amputated) and the loss of her first child—her nearly three-year-old son, Ronan—to a terminal illness, Tay Sachs disease.
The book dances around in time and space (Rapp Black is born twenty years almost to the day after Kahlo’s death), but time, in these essays and, arguably, in life, is irrelevant; illusory; circuitous. It loops and loops back again. How should one mark time anyway? —by cathedral bells? By the moments before losing a leg; a child?: "One day a leg, the next day it is no longer…one day a mother, the next day no longer."
So, in the fourteen chapters, the narrator “walk[s]” together” with Kahlo across time “in all the spaces that unite and divide” them, exploring, in no particular order, topics like: grief; difference; ambition; traction; “broken bod[ies]”—hers, Kahlo’s, Ronan’s; making and unmaking and how one can make even as pain unmakes them; casts, cast-offs, and outcasts; pain and its relationship to art (“art…is necessary…through the pain, not over it, not because of it, and not even despite it”); the body in all of its forms and “mysteries”: normal, nonnormative, whole, disabled, disfigured, beautiful, crippled, complete, freakish, suffering, shamefree, fallen, abnormal, warm, light, heavy, unsafe, hated, fallen, romanticized, fetishized, ugly, symmetrical, desired, honored, solid, strong, offensive, grotesque, and reborn.
As readers, we’re presented with these two women—"The Two Fridas and the Two Emilys"—both of whom keep some of their most personal stories to themselves, even as they reveal other parts to us on the canvas and the page: “known and unknown, seen and unseen.” Through their revelations and silences, they control the narrative—the ways they are perceived—and it’s "a deliberate manipulation” on their part: what to keep “underground…hidden” and what to make visible.
What’s visible is their shared impulse to create: "Still, she painted…still, I wrote," yet each artist has her own history, motivations, secrets, relationships, and traumas that make her entirely singular—the same and not the same: "a part of me and also separate from me…this body, her body, my body."
The word “body” comes up over and over again like a refrain. Its repetition is a plea, a petition, a prayer:
"My daughter made by my body; this mother’s body of one child living, another child dead; my body is the crossroads for two lives; this boy of my body, son of my life; this abnormal woman’s body that is making another body, a little girl, and who made the body of a boy that could not live in this world; the body…no part of it is ever wholly safe [or safely whole]; I am more than this body; I love the one body inside the body I try to love; the body I have been given…both strange and beloved; the secrets of my body; the body of this person who made my body one of a mother; the body that I embody; a body that will lose part of itself; tell me the story of your body."
By the book’s conclusion, we learn more still about bodies—that "Love and bodies come apart," often "like a cheap Barbie doll"—but also that "Art remains."
Like all of Rapp Black’s work, this is an important and thought-provoking read. I urge you to pick up this tiny treasure, this little red book that will fit in the palm of your hand, today. You’ll finish it in one sitting, and then you’ll thank me.
The book dances around in time and space (Rapp Black is born twenty years almost to the day after Kahlo’s death), but time, in these essays and, arguably, in life, is irrelevant; illusory; circuitous. It loops and loops back again. How should one mark time anyway? —by cathedral bells? By the moments before losing a leg; a child?: "One day a leg, the next day it is no longer…one day a mother, the next day no longer."
So, in the fourteen chapters, the narrator “walk[s]” together” with Kahlo across time “in all the spaces that unite and divide” them, exploring, in no particular order, topics like: grief; difference; ambition; traction; “broken bod[ies]”—hers, Kahlo’s, Ronan’s; making and unmaking and how one can make even as pain unmakes them; casts, cast-offs, and outcasts; pain and its relationship to art (“art…is necessary…through the pain, not over it, not because of it, and not even despite it”); the body in all of its forms and “mysteries”: normal, nonnormative, whole, disabled, disfigured, beautiful, crippled, complete, freakish, suffering, shamefree, fallen, abnormal, warm, light, heavy, unsafe, hated, fallen, romanticized, fetishized, ugly, symmetrical, desired, honored, solid, strong, offensive, grotesque, and reborn.
As readers, we’re presented with these two women—"The Two Fridas and the Two Emilys"—both of whom keep some of their most personal stories to themselves, even as they reveal other parts to us on the canvas and the page: “known and unknown, seen and unseen.” Through their revelations and silences, they control the narrative—the ways they are perceived—and it’s "a deliberate manipulation” on their part: what to keep “underground…hidden” and what to make visible.
What’s visible is their shared impulse to create: "Still, she painted…still, I wrote," yet each artist has her own history, motivations, secrets, relationships, and traumas that make her entirely singular—the same and not the same: "a part of me and also separate from me…this body, her body, my body."
The word “body” comes up over and over again like a refrain. Its repetition is a plea, a petition, a prayer:
"My daughter made by my body; this mother’s body of one child living, another child dead; my body is the crossroads for two lives; this boy of my body, son of my life; this abnormal woman’s body that is making another body, a little girl, and who made the body of a boy that could not live in this world; the body…no part of it is ever wholly safe [or safely whole]; I am more than this body; I love the one body inside the body I try to love; the body I have been given…both strange and beloved; the secrets of my body; the body of this person who made my body one of a mother; the body that I embody; a body that will lose part of itself; tell me the story of your body."
By the book’s conclusion, we learn more still about bodies—that "Love and bodies come apart," often "like a cheap Barbie doll"—but also that "Art remains."
Like all of Rapp Black’s work, this is an important and thought-provoking read. I urge you to pick up this tiny treasure, this little red book that will fit in the palm of your hand, today. You’ll finish it in one sitting, and then you’ll thank me.
July 10, 2022
i wish i could remember all the words in this book. very beautiful writing about disability and loss, connected with Frida Kahlo’s own narrative of survival. Here’s a quote: “Art that erupts from the nexus of real friction, real struggle, is a subversive
enterprise producing potentially dangerous, convul-
sive beauty. The suffering woman - is she too easy to
love because she is not perceived as dangerous, when
in fact she is a ticking bomb? The Two Emilys. The
Two Fridas. We walk together in all the spaces that
unite and divide us. In my efforts to understand her, I
begin to better understand myself.”
enterprise producing potentially dangerous, convul-
sive beauty. The suffering woman - is she too easy to
love because she is not perceived as dangerous, when
in fact she is a ticking bomb? The Two Emilys. The
Two Fridas. We walk together in all the spaces that
unite and divide us. In my efforts to understand her, I
begin to better understand myself.”
December 3, 2021
(3.5) This was my third memoir by the author; I reviewed The Still Point of the Turning World and Sanctuary earlier in the year. Like Sinéad Gleeson does in Constellations, Rapp Black turns to Frida Kahlo as a role model for “translating … pain into art.” Polio, a streetcar accident, 32 operations, failed pregnancies and an amputated leg – Kahlo endured much suffering. It was this last particular that especially drew Rapp Black (who has had a prosthetic leg since early childhood) to her. On a visit to Kahlo’s Mexico City home, she can hardly bear the intimacy of seeing Kahlo’s prostheses and corsets. They plunge her back into her own memories: of passing as normal despite a disability, having an eating disorder, losing her son Ronan to Tay-Sachs disease, and starting over with a new marriage and baby. Rapp Black weaves this all together artfully as well as effectively, but for someone like me who is already conversant with her story, there wasn’t quite enough in the way of new material.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
February 17, 2022
This is a truly gorgeous memoir where Black entwines the story of her experiences as a leg amputee and of her young son's death to a rare disorder with the story of Frida Kahlo's multiple disabilities and pregnancy losses throughout her life. It's really gorgeously written.
March 27, 2023
“The prosthetist who made my legs from 1978 to 1987 was a veteran of World War II and the Korean War. His bald head was covered in brown spots, one of which was shaped like the state of Florida. He wore a filthy apron and steel-toed cowboy boots. His office was behind a used car lot in Denver.”
“Stories about disabled athletes are ‘inspirational.’ Stories about forty-something amputee writers with a kid and a job as a professor? Maybe not so super. Maybe not the kind of narrative people want to hear about disability. People crave stories about people who triumph, who ‘overcome’ their disability, but this, too, is a false expectation. I have a disability. Does it rule my life? No. But does it deeply affect my life, particularly as a woman and in the way in which I relate to my body? Every single day. There is no glitter here. Pain is not a baptism into genius.”
“I might understand Frida least of all because I assume that I do, and therefore my lens is cloudy with the not-knowing of thinking that I know.”
“Stories about disabled athletes are ‘inspirational.’ Stories about forty-something amputee writers with a kid and a job as a professor? Maybe not so super. Maybe not the kind of narrative people want to hear about disability. People crave stories about people who triumph, who ‘overcome’ their disability, but this, too, is a false expectation. I have a disability. Does it rule my life? No. But does it deeply affect my life, particularly as a woman and in the way in which I relate to my body? Every single day. There is no glitter here. Pain is not a baptism into genius.”
“I might understand Frida least of all because I assume that I do, and therefore my lens is cloudy with the not-knowing of thinking that I know.”
March 24, 2025
this author came to my school to speak to my disability class and i ended up buying this book bc i had time to spare before my next class. i have been extremely protective of frida as well so this was a really therapeutic read for me. being a woman with a disability is so complex and misunderstood and im just finally feeling more comfortable in outwardly labeling myself as that. this was empowering and beautiful, rapp is one of the best writers i have ever read wow.
August 12, 2021
Book reviews 54/2021 - "Frida Kahlo and my left leg' - Emily Rapp Black
I have to confess that my first thought on receiving this book was ' I paid £14.99 for this and it is a *slim* book. I am a cheapskate. However, it is beautiful, bound in red, Fridas leg standing proud and booted on the front cover and there are colour plates inside as well. Holding it in your hands, you feel a sense of a promise and - at 145 pages, each page costing around 10p, it is worth every penny of that.
This is a beautiful, slight, book. The author is an amputee who feels aligned with Frida, recognising the lack of progress in prosthesis over the 20 years since Frida's death and her birth, she travels to Mexico and tours her house, an affinity with her medical procedures, femininity and constant pain both physical and emotional. The author might not see her pain as pain in relation to her body, more around the attitudes of others, the way that society is disordered around her and significantly - and unexpectedly in relation to the death of her profoundly disabled son who died aged just under three years old.
'Nothing about his body in the world was easy' she comes to understand her lack of a leg in terms of her blind son who has Tay-Sachs disease, which leaves him needing assisted breathing, tube feeding and an inability to move.
She also has massive feminist chops, which gave me a shared mindset, 'When i met a new prosthetist when i was 20, on the wall hung photographs of disabled athletes victoriously crossing finish lines, all men. I wondered aloud to a male amputee why there were no pictures of women amputee athletes. 'Nobody wants to see the body of a disabled woman on a poster' he explained. 'Competitive sports are meant to be aspirational.'
There is so little written about disability from a woman's point of view - The author tackles fetishistic approaches to disability, the lack of agency afforded to women who are unable to run away from you, the dependency of the disabled in an infantalising way - and her hatred of her leg, but her dependency on it, hating part of yourself that is not part of yourself - how disability in terms of portrayals of femininity in a sexualised way is often ignored, reviled, othered.
it's also a beautifully lyrical book, 'The wind relays softly through trees like a skinny, fragrant monkey' Of course it does.
I learned that prosthetic technology has been accelerated by the amount of ex service people who need a prosthetic and technology has evolved to the extent that the wooden leg of Fridas last year or two of life and Emily's teens has been replaced by 'knees that operate like computers, feet with shock absorbers that allow people to run and leap and compete in competitive sports'
The book ends with her beautiful daughter being forced to go to the travelling exhibition of Frida's effects in London and finding it all a bit 'meh', but then lster galloping towards her with a friend and asking her Mum to show her friend her 'Leggie' because she doesn't believe that her mum has one she can take off. Matter of fact in the way that children are.
I don't often say this at risk of sounding a bit wanky, but this book is profound. So much on disability, motherhood, art, loss, grief, feminism, Frida. 5 stars, I will be reading more by this author.
I have to confess that my first thought on receiving this book was ' I paid £14.99 for this and it is a *slim* book. I am a cheapskate. However, it is beautiful, bound in red, Fridas leg standing proud and booted on the front cover and there are colour plates inside as well. Holding it in your hands, you feel a sense of a promise and - at 145 pages, each page costing around 10p, it is worth every penny of that.
This is a beautiful, slight, book. The author is an amputee who feels aligned with Frida, recognising the lack of progress in prosthesis over the 20 years since Frida's death and her birth, she travels to Mexico and tours her house, an affinity with her medical procedures, femininity and constant pain both physical and emotional. The author might not see her pain as pain in relation to her body, more around the attitudes of others, the way that society is disordered around her and significantly - and unexpectedly in relation to the death of her profoundly disabled son who died aged just under three years old.
'Nothing about his body in the world was easy' she comes to understand her lack of a leg in terms of her blind son who has Tay-Sachs disease, which leaves him needing assisted breathing, tube feeding and an inability to move.
She also has massive feminist chops, which gave me a shared mindset, 'When i met a new prosthetist when i was 20, on the wall hung photographs of disabled athletes victoriously crossing finish lines, all men. I wondered aloud to a male amputee why there were no pictures of women amputee athletes. 'Nobody wants to see the body of a disabled woman on a poster' he explained. 'Competitive sports are meant to be aspirational.'
There is so little written about disability from a woman's point of view - The author tackles fetishistic approaches to disability, the lack of agency afforded to women who are unable to run away from you, the dependency of the disabled in an infantalising way - and her hatred of her leg, but her dependency on it, hating part of yourself that is not part of yourself - how disability in terms of portrayals of femininity in a sexualised way is often ignored, reviled, othered.
it's also a beautifully lyrical book, 'The wind relays softly through trees like a skinny, fragrant monkey' Of course it does.
I learned that prosthetic technology has been accelerated by the amount of ex service people who need a prosthetic and technology has evolved to the extent that the wooden leg of Fridas last year or two of life and Emily's teens has been replaced by 'knees that operate like computers, feet with shock absorbers that allow people to run and leap and compete in competitive sports'
The book ends with her beautiful daughter being forced to go to the travelling exhibition of Frida's effects in London and finding it all a bit 'meh', but then lster galloping towards her with a friend and asking her Mum to show her friend her 'Leggie' because she doesn't believe that her mum has one she can take off. Matter of fact in the way that children are.
I don't often say this at risk of sounding a bit wanky, but this book is profound. So much on disability, motherhood, art, loss, grief, feminism, Frida. 5 stars, I will be reading more by this author.
Read
January 10, 2023One of my personal reading goals this year is to read more books by disabled authors, starting with this one (even though I consider Voice of The Fish to also be a piece involving discussion of disability and ableism). Searing, unsparing, and blunt, about the role of art, motherhood amidst a disabled body, grieving and being grieved at, the untranslatable nature of pain, of a joyous and rich life not despite, not due to, not "inspired by", not "overcome by", but through disability.
Read
September 18, 2022I came to this one expecting it to be more about Kahlo and less about Rapp Black. Once I got over that, I began to enjoy the way the book unites the writer with the older artist and critically explores the perception that pain is a kind of muse for art.
July 18, 2023
Really enjoyed this, especially loved how it ended, I love this quote: "Art from pain is not therapeutic; it is necessary, and the muse is always survival - through the pain, not over it, not because of it, and not even despite it."
December 26, 2022
If I could give this 10 stars I would. Wow
April 24, 2023
Couldn't put it down.
December 5, 2023
This was positively stunning. A must-read.
July 15, 2023
“love and bodies come apart but art remains” SO REAL AAAA
September 9, 2023
2023: so much grief and love all bundled together in this short collection
Black does not hesitate in her interrogation of what life is like as a disabled person in America today. She really struck me with the discussion about her conflicted opinions on the military: “Access, then, to advanced prosthetics, is directly related to our country’s involvement in warfare.” Black remembers one of the worst jobs she's ever had, confirming that all women hate their bodies by working as a bra fitter at Victoria's Secret.
I did not know how little I knew about Frida Kahlo before diving into this book. Black takes us on a tour of her life and offers insights into Frida's thoughts and experiences, as some of them mirror her own. “Each night the body is reshaped with the removal of the prosthetic, placed next to the bed within easy reach, and each morning refashioned through the act of reattachment. Each day this rebirth.” I was struck by what a source of comfort and recognition that Frida had been for Black, and I imagine that this book will be for others. However, I don't know if it will strike a chord more with other disabled women so much as it will with other mothers who have lost their children.
Here's the deal - I was not planning on reading another book by a parent who had lost their young son this year. So it took me by surprise to discover that so much of this book covered life after Black's son died. Of course, this is no fault of Black's, who of course did not plan for her young son to die, and I'm sure would have much preferred that not to be a part of her life. However, there is no page of this short essay collection that Ronan's death did not touch. “The brain is not destroyed [by pain], but it is altered, and altered does not mean recovered.” You've been warned before you dive into this one.
Black does not hesitate in her interrogation of what life is like as a disabled person in America today. She really struck me with the discussion about her conflicted opinions on the military: “Access, then, to advanced prosthetics, is directly related to our country’s involvement in warfare.” Black remembers one of the worst jobs she's ever had, confirming that all women hate their bodies by working as a bra fitter at Victoria's Secret.
I did not know how little I knew about Frida Kahlo before diving into this book. Black takes us on a tour of her life and offers insights into Frida's thoughts and experiences, as some of them mirror her own. “Each night the body is reshaped with the removal of the prosthetic, placed next to the bed within easy reach, and each morning refashioned through the act of reattachment. Each day this rebirth.” I was struck by what a source of comfort and recognition that Frida had been for Black, and I imagine that this book will be for others. However, I don't know if it will strike a chord more with other disabled women so much as it will with other mothers who have lost their children.
Here's the deal - I was not planning on reading another book by a parent who had lost their young son this year. So it took me by surprise to discover that so much of this book covered life after Black's son died. Of course, this is no fault of Black's, who of course did not plan for her young son to die, and I'm sure would have much preferred that not to be a part of her life. However, there is no page of this short essay collection that Ronan's death did not touch. “The brain is not destroyed [by pain], but it is altered, and altered does not mean recovered.” You've been warned before you dive into this one.
December 30, 2023
A small book of interwoven personal essays about the author's connection to Kahlo due to their shared experiences of disability and pain. The language was oftentimes gorgeous and Rapp Black spared nothing in her honesty about what she's faced. I appreciated this, and I especially connected with the reflections on pain, the body as currency, and why we are expected to suffer to create art (a notion the author dissects).
The collection had moments of redundancy that made sense in these as stand-alone essays but not when they were read together, and an editor may have helped determine where best to leave in and trim those out. I also found the connection to Kahlo faltered; that is, it wasn't directly present throughout despite that seemingly being the objective of the collection. I can also see from other reviews that the author has written in separate books about her children (her first child, a son, died of Tay-Sachs), and readers of her oeuvre thus found this book repetitive. This was my introduction to her work, so I found it new material, but I can see how for other readers it was a repeat; this book is small but covers a lot of ground, so a tighter focus could address that for those readers. But as an introduction to the author and her story, it works. So it would depend on the objective for the collection.
I was left with a lot to think about, and I wish more people would read disabled authors and realize the importance of envisioning life in a world hostile to difference, because at any moment, anyone could find themselves in that position. Disability is not inspirational material; it's another way of living and navigating the world, and until we become a more accessible society that values differences and strives toward access for all, we are failing all of us.
I will return to this author's powerful words for further reflection.
The collection had moments of redundancy that made sense in these as stand-alone essays but not when they were read together, and an editor may have helped determine where best to leave in and trim those out. I also found the connection to Kahlo faltered; that is, it wasn't directly present throughout despite that seemingly being the objective of the collection. I can also see from other reviews that the author has written in separate books about her children (her first child, a son, died of Tay-Sachs), and readers of her oeuvre thus found this book repetitive. This was my introduction to her work, so I found it new material, but I can see how for other readers it was a repeat; this book is small but covers a lot of ground, so a tighter focus could address that for those readers. But as an introduction to the author and her story, it works. So it would depend on the objective for the collection.
I was left with a lot to think about, and I wish more people would read disabled authors and realize the importance of envisioning life in a world hostile to difference, because at any moment, anyone could find themselves in that position. Disability is not inspirational material; it's another way of living and navigating the world, and until we become a more accessible society that values differences and strives toward access for all, we are failing all of us.
I will return to this author's powerful words for further reflection.
August 22, 2024
In goes without saying that I am predisposed to love any form of art that is inspired by the real Frida, not her commercialized image. But, Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg by Emily Rapp Black is in a league of its own.
Black is such a eloquent writer, whose words feel like paint strokes on the page.
This novel deals with the contradictions of the female body- as an object; as a functioning home. Navigating the world as an amputee in a culture that praises symmetry. Grieving and how it defines who we are.
However, the spine of Black's novel, to me, is demystifying the myth of the “tortured artist.” Black challenges the idea of pain as a muse and states: “the muse is always survival- through the pain.”
“Suffering does not create art, people do.”
“Love and bodies come apart, Art remains.”
Black is such a eloquent writer, whose words feel like paint strokes on the page.
This novel deals with the contradictions of the female body- as an object; as a functioning home. Navigating the world as an amputee in a culture that praises symmetry. Grieving and how it defines who we are.
However, the spine of Black's novel, to me, is demystifying the myth of the “tortured artist.” Black challenges the idea of pain as a muse and states: “the muse is always survival- through the pain.”
“Suffering does not create art, people do.”
“Love and bodies come apart, Art remains.”
March 26, 2023
This book is wildly good. I love books that are a combination of memoir and art analysis/writing, though they are not large in number (The White Dress being one). I haven’t been so emotionally gut punched by a book in a long time. I will warn people that this was quite a heavy book to get through, as so much of it is about the loss of a child, sexualization of disabled girls, and pain. There is also some brief mention of an eating disorder, if that is hard for anyone to read about. Emily Rapp Black’s writing is so beautiful, reflective, and vulnerable. I don’t know why I had the impression when I bought this that it would be more light-hearted, but it certainly was not! That said, it was spectacular.
May 24, 2021
Not an easy read.
I found this book too intense and hard to relate to. I dislike Frida’s art and although I have great sympathy for her accidents, traumas, and eventually losing her leg, I can’t let my sympathy rule my head in this instance.
Emily Rapp Black is an author who has also suffered terrible losses in her life. Her ability to understand and feel a connection with Frida is therefore understandable. We should therefore be grateful that she has used the connection of their loss of limb to share their stories.
Rony
Elite Reviewing Group received a copy of the book to review.
I found this book too intense and hard to relate to. I dislike Frida’s art and although I have great sympathy for her accidents, traumas, and eventually losing her leg, I can’t let my sympathy rule my head in this instance.
Emily Rapp Black is an author who has also suffered terrible losses in her life. Her ability to understand and feel a connection with Frida is therefore understandable. We should therefore be grateful that she has used the connection of their loss of limb to share their stories.
Rony
Elite Reviewing Group received a copy of the book to review.
December 20, 2022
An unbelievably powerful read, so close and so intimate.
“This is Frida’s gift: to acquaint us with our own losses in a way that refuses to hide or sublimate the truth of them. Frida was an artist who refused to be banished to some stereotypical underworld. She made her pain visible in a way she herself chose; the rest stayed hidden. In some ways, her life and her work provided a new method for navigating loss of all kinds: the fracturing of love, the fracturing of a body, loss after loss after loss.”
“This is Frida’s gift: to acquaint us with our own losses in a way that refuses to hide or sublimate the truth of them. Frida was an artist who refused to be banished to some stereotypical underworld. She made her pain visible in a way she herself chose; the rest stayed hidden. In some ways, her life and her work provided a new method for navigating loss of all kinds: the fracturing of love, the fracturing of a body, loss after loss after loss.”
March 18, 2025
May be a 4 - but something about the author's use of words to express her vulnerability and using them to turn her pain into feelings left a mark. Blessed are those who can use any form of art to express their grief and emotional turmoil --- Kahlo has left an enduring legacy, while I have sincere appreciation for her work and the life that she lived, to read how it has impacted someone's life so much was endearing. I would re-read this during times of personal health downtimes.
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May 13, 2022This is a hard book to rate, so I won't. These essays are not written for me. I think I'm just going to let myself take in the experience of having read it because this is a both of emotion, not cold criticism.
August 8, 2023
"I might look strange, but I will try as hard as I can to show everyone that this body doesn't make me who I am, that I am more than this body."
This book left a big impression on me through it's raw emotions.
Very inspiring and eye opening in many different aspects.
This book left a big impression on me through it's raw emotions.
Very inspiring and eye opening in many different aspects.
May 7, 2022
I would give this ten stars if I could. Just stunning.
June 30, 2022
Pain does not create art, people do. Insightful and new, slightly repetitive but a new lens on Frida and pain and art
July 26, 2022
I feel a lot of connection, but you still have to carry your own cross, alone, making effort.
January 23, 2023
Brilliant
February 8, 2023
Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous, absolutely devastating and wise and gorgeous.
April 10, 2023
“Art from pain is not therapeutic; it is necessary, and the muse is always survival - through the pain, not over it, not because of it, and not even despite it.”
August 2, 2023
extremely thought provoking book on motherhood, grief and disability. very beautifully written. read the whole book in a day, couldn’t put it down
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