Press Reviews

• David Mitchell

  Luminous; a profound portrait of the artist as a young-and mature-woman; an unflinching social history of disability over the last six decades; and a hymn to life, love, family, and spirit

• Stephen Asma

  Lehrer's story is a revelation of an inner subjective life-full of tragedy, love, and creativity-pushing against the external social stigmas, cultural narratives, and prejudices surrounding disability. She admits a felt kinship with other 'monsters' because their bodies were also 'built by human hands', but unlike them, she is her own purpose, her own meaning, her own unstoppable golem

• Nicola Griffith, author of HILD

  With deft painter's prose, Riva Lehrer helps us discover what it is to be human when others see us as broken. In Golem Girl, Lehrer gives us the gift, at long last, of our own crip beauty

• Audrey Niffenegger

  Riva Lehrer is a great artist and a great storyteller. This is a brilliant book, full of strangeness, beauty, and wonder

• Andrew Solomon

  Vivid . . . unforgettable . . . It is the story of how someone who is fundamentally different made not a life that transcends that difference, but a life that lionizes it. This book expands our notion of what constitutes the human experience, and it does so with generosity and open-heartedness

• Alison Bechdel

  This searing personal history expands Lehrer's project of looking at our bodies inside and out, in all their queerness, fragility, and strength, into a stunning new dimension

• Alice Wong, founder and director, Disability Visibility Project

  Not your typical memoir about 'what it's like to be disabled in a non-disabled world . . . Lehrer tells her stories about becoming the monster she was always meant to be: glorious, defiant, unbound, and voracious. Read it!

• Lawrence Weschler

  Oy, what a story: Job, eat your heart out! In Riva Lehrer's life chronicle, an appalling fate (and I don't just mean the circumstances of her birth) gets visited upon an invincible character, and the result is a wincing-wise tale, by turns harrowing and hilarious, cut clean through with flecks of grace and beauty. Lehrer is one wry mensch, and an extraordinary kinstler to boot

• Publishers Weekly

  Readers will be sucked into Lehrer's powerful memoir

• Booklist (starred review)

  A chronicle of a free spirit who finds solace and purpose in creating art that represents the socially challenged body... [readers] will respond to Lehrer's remarkable resilience and robust sense of humor

• Kirkus Reviews (Starred)

  Every bit as powerful as Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face ... An extraordinary memoir suffused with generosity, consistent insight, and striking artwork

• Mat Fraser

  One of the most dedicated, stalwart, witty, funny people that I've ever met

• Jewish Chronicle

  An extraordinary memoir in which Riva Lehrer charts with great humour and intimacy her life story, growing up in America with the spina bifida condition . . . Throughout this powerful book - which took her six and a half years to write - Lehrer draws the reader in, giving the sense of what it is like to be on the margins of society, and having metaphorically to shriek to get the mainstream to pay attention

• Cerrie Burnell

  This astonishing, heart soaring and often shocking memoir of a Jewish woman with spina Bifida born in the 50's is bright and dark, terrifying and wonderful. An ode to art and the beauty of disability