Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg

by Emily Black

Overview

At first sight of Kahlo's painting The Two Fridas, Emily Rapp Black felt a connection with the artist. An amputee from childhood, Rapp Black grew up with a succession of prosthetic limbs, and learned that she had to hide her disability from the world.

Kahlo sustained lifelong injuries after a horrific bus crash and her right leg was eventually amputated. In Kahlo's art, Rapp Black recognised her own life, from the numerous operations to the compulsion to create to silence pain. Here she tells her story of losing her infant son to Tay-Sachs, giving birth to a daughter, and learning to accept her body. She writes of how Frida Kahlo inspired her to find a way forward when all seemed lost.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781912559275
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	06/15/2021
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200
File size:	603 KB

About the Author

Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir and The Still Point of the Turning World, a New York Times bestseller and an Editor's Pick. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including VOGUE, the New York Times, TIME, the Wall Street Journal, O the Oprah Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times.
Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir and The Still Point of the Turning World, a New York Times bestseller and an Editor’s Pick. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including VOGUE, the New York Times, TIME, the Wall Street Journal, O the Oprah Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times.

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

2021-04-10
Memoirist Rapp Black muses on the connections between her life and that of artist Frida Kahlo in this slim, loosely connected book of essays.

In three previous books, including this year’s Sanctuary, Rapp Black examined the impact of the loss of her left leg as the result of a congenital birth defect and the heartbreaking death of her 2-year-old son, who suffered from inherited Tay-Sachs disease. Throughout these circuitous essays, the author circles back to these subjects, often repeating herself from chapter to chapter and frequently tying her suffering to that of Kahlo, with her "many accidents and wounds and operations and recoveries." It's the suffering Kahlo who comes through most clearly here, as Rapp Black chronicles her travels to Mexico City to gaze at the room in the house, now a museum, where Kahlo kept her "corsets, special shoes and prosthetic legs," vivid photos of which illustrate the book. Noting the “disorienting” experience, the author writes, “I feel as though I am entering a sacred space with a touch of haunt.” The author views Kahlo as an imaginary friend or even a twin, someone with whom she can ally against those with “normal bodies, easily moving bodies, bodies that did not come apart like a cheap Barbie doll.” Another pilgrimage took Rapp Black to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where she viewed the clothes that represented Kahlo’s “quintessential ‘look.’ ” The essays make more sense as free-standing works than as elements of a larger whole, in part because they're arranged with no regard for temporal sequence. As a writer, Rapp Black is capable of elegantly expressing pain and sorrow, and she is clearly well versed in Kahlo scholarship. Structurally, however, the book is disjointed, its insights available in sentences or phrases rather than an organized, sustained argument.

Glimpses into the ongoing repercussions of loss.

Kirkus Reviews