Emily Rapp writes about her experiences growing up with limb loss in her recently published memoir, Poster Child, by Bloomsbury Press. In it, she flips through the calendar pages of her life — even imagining the moment of her own birth when her parents first realized that their daughter was different. Her parents immediately loved her and accepted her the way she was and that in itself was important to her writing this book.  

Due to a congenital birth defect, Rapp had many surgeries that put her in and out of the hospital throughout her childhood. In 1978, she became an amputee at the age of 4. She writes about the childhood awareness of her body so that these memories read like discovered gems — the disbelief she feels upon awaking from surgery to find that her foot is gone or the fantasies of battle and dragons she tells herself about her scars.

As memoirists seek to fulfill human curiosity about another person’s perspective, Rapp’s memoir may be even more fully appreciated by amputees of all ages. Her story focuses on the everyday experiences of a girl growing up with limb loss.

She says of the experience of writing her memoir, “I wanted to write the book that I wished I had been able to read about somebody else.”

Emily Rapp is not only a writer, but also a professor of creative nonfiction. Through her education and practice, she has found writing tools to help her see herself as a character. It wasn’t a stretch for her to go forward and write the story of her life, because she’s been used to speaking about her condition to strangers.

Rapp says, “I’m often asked, ‘What happened to you? What’s wrong with you? Why are you limping?’ Then the whole story has to come out, which is actually deeply personal.”

However intrusive or awkward it is to be exposed, whether by open-backed hospital gowns or by strangers’ questions and stares, she has told the story of her disability as a way of entry into the able-bodied world.

Rapp’s subject matter may be deeply personal to her own life, yet readers of all kinds can relate to the feelings she addresses, such as shame and anger, as she learns about dating, fitting in and growing up. But through it all, Rapp never felt that she was disabled, in part because her parents never treated her any differently. Nevertheless, when Rapp becomes the March of Dimes poster child in her rural Wyoming town, she must pass posters of herself on walls everywhere around her.

Poster Child is not just a story about past events. It is also a story of one woman’s journey toward self-acceptance. For mothers of kids with limb loss, many of whom Rapp has met since the books’ publication, it has helped them feel less isolated.

She says, “It’s great to meet someone and say, ‘Hey, I live in the world, and I’m happy. It’s not as bad as you think it’ll be.’”

Over the years, Emily Rapp has been through about 12 legs, and most were prior to the cosmetic and technological advancements now available to amputees. But Rapp has always found a way to do what she wants, including traveling to distant locations around the world. By the time she found the Amputee Coalition of America (ACA), she had already been through many of the most difficult years growing up, but to her it was also valuable just knowing that the ACA exists as a way to connect with other amputees.

For the next generation of amputees, Rapp hopes that kids are not as hard on themselves as she was on herself growing up.

“I think there is a real pressure to be extraordinary in order to compensate,” she says. “I would also hope that they don’t feel as alone and that they value the bodies that they do have regardless of what society says — it’s an overall difficult thing to do.”

Rapp shows readers the value of compassionate self-reflection and the personal transformation that can come from such an inquiry. Her readers too will feel her story creatively and convincingly striking chords of common understanding.