Emily Rapp at Cody's Books January 23, 2007

EMILY RAPP was a POSTER CHILD. At age six, Emily Rapp’s face was featured on posters throughout the Midwest for the March of Dimes annual fundraising campaign. But whether as an object of sympathy, ridicule, or triumph over adversity, Emily was always staring back and observing. POSTER CHILD is her eloquent, darkly comic, but also painfully blunt (about herself as much as society) account of living and coping with her disability. She reveled in her poster child role, but felt increasingly inadequate as she grew older. Overachieving in academics, in sports, in socializing, she was, by adolescence, “merciless and cruel” at times, judging classmates, showing little compassion for other disabled children, and craving popularity. Self-deception about being able-bodied was not just the route to acceptance, but to love and intimacy. In a way not seen since Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, Emily Rapp tells a compelling story of how the body and the mind can be broken in a multitude of ways – and how healing acceptance may come around. 7:00 PM at Cody’s Stockton Street, San Francisco

Official Website: http://www.codysbooks.com/calendar/jan07Calendar.jsp