Rebekah Taussig’s essay collection Sitting Pretty: The View from my Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body grew out of her Instagram account (also called @sitting_pretty) in which she posts “mini memoirs” in words and photographs, sharing with others her experiences as a woman who uses a wheelchair. The essays cover a lot of ground, including the challenge of finding accessible housing, the stories of Taussig’s two marriages (and experiences with dating in between), her work as a high school English teacher, and memories of growing up in the Kansas suburbs in a family of six children with a father who rose every morning at 4:30 to take the bus to work at a bank. All of these experiences are examined through the lens of Taussig’s work as a disability scholar, but the tone is warm, funny, and friendly, more like a friend arriving at the bar with a “you won’t believe what just happened to me” story than a scholarly tome.
Throughout the book, Taussig talks about how, growing up, she didn’t have any models of people like her to look up to or use their experiences as road maps for the kind of life she wanted, with a career and romance and financial independence, and this book provides that for younger people today. There are a few tips for nondisabled people (don’t say handicapped, don’t assume that disabled people are incompetent, think critically about why stories about those “heartwarming” stories of wheelchair users standing or walking down the aisle at their weddings), but for the most part the book is simply an interesting, thoughtful person telling the story of her life. As with any good memoir, we might learn some lessons for our own lives along the way.