Books After Dark to discuss disability through reading of ‘Sitting Pretty’

By Dianne Bystrom, director of communications

“Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body” by Rebekah Taussig will
be the topic of discussion on Nov. 12 for Books After Dark, the League of Women Voters of
Greater Omaha’s book club.

For this discussion, the LWV of Nebraska’s Disability and Behavioral Health Action Team and
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Justice Systems and Accessibility Committee is “proudly partnering
with Greater Omaha’s Books After Dark to bring forward a discussion on ableism,” said Aimée
Folker, co-director of disability and behavioral health and co-chair of the DEIJA Committee for
the LWVNE.

The program will be presented via Zoom on Tuesday, Nov. 12, at 6:30 p.m. CST. You can register for the program at this link.

“We hope you will join us in forwarding the discussions about accessibility both physical and neurodivergence,” Folker said. “Our bodies and brains come in varied and vastly different
configurations. When a society imagines difference rather than defaults to a medical standard amazing things can happen.”

As an example, Folker said that “curb cuts – which were made mandatory by the Americans with Disabilities Act – helped not only people in wheelchairs but also families with strollers, people riding bikes and the elderly with canes or basic walkers.”

According to an overview on the National Endowment for the Arts website, Taussig, the book’s author, was born in Manhattan, Kansas, in the mid-1980s. She was 14 months old when she was diagnosed with a malignant cancer that attacked her spine. Two years of intense treatment left her cancer-free but paralyzed from the waist down. “As a young girl, she searched for nuanced depictions of disability: stories that captured all the ways disability could be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and fulfilling,” according to the NEA’s overview. As an adult, Taussig created her own depiction.

 “Sitting Pretty” is a memoir-in-essays spanning personal stories and family histories, offering “a fierce and fabulous revision to entrenched ableist scripts” (Kirkus Reviews) through “spunky, self-aware wit, combined with education that
never feels didactic,” according to speaker and disability rights activist Emily Ladau.

“Taussig’s explorations of the ways her own ordinary, resilient, disabled body interacts with a largely able-bodied world are complex, evading neatly tied conclusions and categories,”
according to The Rumpus, an online literary magazine. “Part wake-up call, part call-to-action, this [book] will resonate with anyone who lives in a body, disabled and nondisabled alike,” wrote LitHub.

Books After Dark is open to all League members and the general public, Folker said. “So we encourage you to invite your friends and family to join us on Nov. 12.”