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Notting Hill Editions

Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg

Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg

by Emily Rapp Black

$19.95
$19.95
Available as E-Book Biography & Memoir Essays & Criticism Literature in English
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At first sight of Frida 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 recognized 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.

Cover image: Frida Kahlo, prosthetic limb. Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera Archives. Bank of Mexico, Fiduciary in the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museum Trust.

Additional Book Information

Series: Notting Hill Editions
ISBN: 9781912559268
Pages: 200
Publication Date:

Praise

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, author and poet of If You Have To Go and Blood Lyrics

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