Golem Girl by Riva Lehrer book Review

 

Golem Girl by Riva Lehrer book Review 

Golem girl by Riva Lehrer. This is a memoir and in this book, Riva Lehrer goes over basically the entire course of her life. 

She is an artist and a painter and she was born with spina bifida. So this book covers basically her experiences with a disability and how that has defined her whole life. 

She literally starts from the moment that she was born and what this disease is and what it has caused to happen basically over the course of her life. 

Like the numerous amounts of surgery and medical conditions that she's had to deal with because of it. But she also talks about like the world's reaction to her and to this disease. 

So Riva Lehrer was born i think in the 1960s. And so growing up in like the 60s and 70s, obviously like the way these diseases were treated and dealt with is different than how it is today. 

She talks about the fact that when she was born it was basically assumed that you wouldn't grow up to become an adult. Like at that point in time people with spina bifida often died relatively young, either due to the disease or like complications related to the disease. 

It requires like a significant amount of surgeries and especially now there's like technology to help create like safer surgeries, but like dealing with surgeries surrounding the spine is obviously always going to be extremely high risk. 

And so when she was born, her parents were basically told by doctors to like prepare for her death. But her parents never took that as an option and fought constantly in order to provide their daughter with the best possible care that they could possibly find. 

She was born to a Jewish family in Cincinnati and by like the luck of the fates, her mother worked as a — she didn't work as a pharmacist but she worked as like a researcher. She studied pharmacy, her grandfather ran a pharmacy, things like that. 

So her mother had actually like some knowledge about this disease before she had a child with it. And so she was able to find the best doctors out there because she like knew who to talk to, she already had connections and things like that.

So that obviously led to Riva having a better life than a lot of other people have with this disease. And so this book is broken up into two parts. 

You see Riva as a child growing up and you basically-- the first part basically follows her through high school and then the second part of her life is her like going off to college and like kind of being on her own more and her figuring out how to handle herself and the best ways to take care of herself. 

But also just like the general figuring out who she is and who she wants to be and stuff like that that everyone has to go through, but obviously with this extra layer of having a disability and how that both restricts you and also like opens up possibilities that most people wouldn't think about having. 

She also talks about her life as a painter and an artist and how all of that is basically like intertwined with this disease. 

And she discusses a lot of things in here. Like this is a thicker book, like the book the whole thing looks a lot longer than it actually is. It's around 350 pages, the paper is like a thicker, nicer material and like the last 100 pages or so are kind of like notes or resources and things along those lines.

But there is a lot that's discussed in here. Some of it feels very like almost mundane. Like she tells stories about her life at school that feel very like common that aren't necessarily like related to her disability. 

Like she talks about the fact that the school that she went to up until high school everyone thought it was haunted and she tells a story about like a time that she legitimately believes that she saw a ghost at her school and stuff like that. 

And so like that's like a chapter in this story, which is like completely disconnected from everything else that's going on in this book. But also, at the same time, just is legitimately a part of her story and a part of her life.

This book is like fully encompassing of everything that she has experienced. Like this is a book that you can call like being completely open and honest about her life experience. 

One of the things i really, really enjoyed about this book is that like she tells these stories about herself and she doesn't like make herself look better than she was in those positions. 

Like she comes off sometimes as being like very selfish and self-centered and not like recognizing her own privilege and things like that, and she like openly talks about that. 

Like she talks about the fact that she had a lot of privileges that a lot of other people didn't have. She had a family with money that was able to support her a lot in her adult life so she wasn't struggling to find a place to live.

And she talks about the fact that like her disability wasn't as bad as other people, like she still had the ability to walk and she still had access to a lot of things that a lot of other kids and a lot of their people growing up with don't have. 

And so she like acknowledges that but also like she doesn't like try to make herself seem like this really great person. 

This is a very honest take — from you know an outsider perspective at least — of what life was like for, her which i really appreciated. Some people i saw like didn't like it as much. Like they were like, 'riva comes off as a very like selfish, spoiled person.' 

And yeah, she does but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Like people have flaws and she's honest about her flaws. Yeah i really enjoyed this book a lot. 

I do think that like there are times where i was reading this book and i was just getting a little bit bored. Like it feels like some of the stories probably could have been edited out. 

But i like sort of the different explorations that she takes in here. It's definitely more of a like all-encompassing story because, again, it's going through her entire life. 

So it doesn't do any significant deep dives but it does provide you with like really great perspectives on the progress that has been made on accessibility and disabilities and things like that, but also like how little progress has also been made. 

She's very honest about like the way that people talk to her and talked about her. She talks about her own preferences in regards to like talking about disabilities and things like that and also her own blind sides. 

Like even though she has a disability, there's still like lots of other areas that she doesn't have an understanding on. And she also talks about how like that intersects with like race and gender and things like that, which is fantastic. 

And she obviously as a jewish woman faces certain aspects of it but like doesn't face other aspects of it and things like that, and she talks about that briefly in here as well. 

The parts in here where she talks about her mother are like extremely moving because her mother also dealt with some like physical ailments and other things like that, which i won't get into because i think like seeing how that story evolves is really beautiful and heartbreaking. 

But the way that she talks about her mother is just again really, really beautiful and it's just heartbreaking to see like what exactly happens to her mother and the way that doctors have treated patients over the years and things like that is just really fascinating. 

She talks about the increased likelihood of someone with a disability to get s*xually assaulted or harassed. Yeah, there's a lot that is covered in this book but i enjoyed every aspect of it. 

Partially because like it obviously provides me, as a person without a physical disability, to like try to understand what life is like for them. There's like this one like footnote in here that talks about ableism that i thought was just like so fantastic. 

And because Riva Lehrer is also an artist this book is also filled with really really great art. A lot of it is her art itself and so it's cool to see sort of like the evolution of her art.

Some of the portraits that she has done later on in her career like in the 2000s compared to like some of the stuff she was doing in like the 80s, you can see so much growth and you can see so much evolution, which is really, really cool. 

And also like part of that end section that i mentioned as being notes is also like notes on those paintings that she's included in here, talking about the inspiration, the people who are in them things like that. 

And so it provides some really cool context. I think like the two sections are so very different from each other but i found them both to be like really fascinating.

Personally i really like the art section a little bit more probably because it felt slightly more focused and also I'm just someone who always really enjoys it when like people who create things talk about the things that they created and talk about like the inspiration and the process and all of that stuff. Like i'm that type of person so that all really appealed to me. 

So yeah, there's a lot of things going on in this book but i again just really enjoyed it. I think that it's a really great glimpse at one person's experience with a disability.

Like one of the things, again, that's discussed in here is the fact that like people with disabilities are not like a single entity. Like they all have different experiences. Even like a single person who's diagnosed with spina bifida can have a varying degree of how that affects their physical ailments. 

But it also just like provides this really great perspective of like the fact that people who don't have disabilities assume that like if you have a disability they're like missing out on things or they can't experience certain things. 

One of the things talked about a lot in here is the fact that like a lot of people just assumed that Riva Lehrer would never like fall in love, have a boyfriend or anything along those lines because in their head they could never imagine either someone falling in love with someone who looked like her or had that sort of disability, or they couldn't like imagine 

Riva Lehrer as like a full human being, which i thought was like a really interesting discussion. 

There's also like a lot of discussions in here about queerness because Riva Lehrer is queer and so she talks about her like explorations of what that is and what that's meant for her. 

A lot of times people who are able bodied view people who have some sort of disability as like lacking and have a hard time picturing them as like a full human being on their own who can fully experience life, just experience it in a different way and stuff like that. 

So yeah, i really, really enjoyed this book a whole lot and i highly recommend it i think that if you're someone who is looking to read more stories by and about people with different disabilities, this would be a really great one to pick up. 

Like i said earlier, it's a little bit sprawling at times but i found it to be like a really fascinating piece. And i appreciated the fact that Riva Lehrer acknowledges her privileges at various points along the story. 

And so that felt like even though she has a lot of privilege, the fact that she's willing to acknowledge it and point it out shows that like she's also you know aware of what's going on here and that her story isn't by far like the most difficult situation or anything along those lines and she doesn't try to pretend it is. So yeah, really great, highly recommend it. Yeah, really good book. 

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