 | Rarely has a book made me feel so deeply understood. Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body is an essay-memoir by disability advocate Rebekah Taussig. She articulates the challenges and joys of life with altered abilities; her legs are paralyzed from childhood cancer and she navigates the world from a wheelchair. The author has a thoughtful and thought-provoking take on life in a differently-abled body, and the gifts of adaptive aids and accessibility. For example: “We don’t tend to equate a person wearing glasses with ‘disability,’ even if that same person would have been considered disabled in another time and place.” |
The author says, “We should bring disabled perspectives to the center because these perspectives create a world that is more imaginative, more flexible, more sustainable, more dynamic and vibrant for everyone who lives in a body.”
 | [Disabled people] “have our thumbs on the heartbeat of adaptability, we know how to imagine a more flexible world; our very existence, our everyday lies, are an exercise in imagination.” This might sound like the science fiction premise of a disabled woman adapting to a dystopian hellscape (Furiosa), but also applies to our world: “The most consistent, most universal, most shared experience in having a body is that they all change, and if you live long enough, they all start to slow, forget, fracture, ignore orders, and revolt. [When we resist disability], we’re all left less equipped, less adaptable for the inevitable challenges in life.” |
The author deftly describes the challenges of living in an ableist world (which ignores or neglects its differently-abled citizens):
“Ableism pushes assumptions like: Some bodies/minds/modes are inherently and always preferable to others. Hearing/speaking is always better than deafness/signing. Bipeds walking is definitely preferable to paraplegics wheeling. Each of us has a ‘whole,’ ‘unmarred,’ ‘perfect’ body that we are meant to have; the paralyzed, autistic, deaf version is just a sadder, lesser version of that original intent. … I don’t need my paralyzed legs to be erased in order to be seen as able, healthy, beautiful, whole, successful, or happy.”
“Ableism pushes assumptions like: Some bodies/minds/modes are inherently and always preferable to others. Hearing/speaking is always better than deafness/signing. Bipeds walking is definitely preferable to paraplegics wheeling. Each of us has a ‘whole,’ ‘unmarred,’ ‘perfect’ body that we are meant to have; the paralyzed, autistic, deaf version is just a sadder, lesser version of that original intent. … I don’t need my paralyzed legs to be erased in order to be seen as able, healthy, beautiful, whole, successful, or happy.”
 | In July 2025, I went on supplemental oxygen for my pulmonary sarcoidosis. I’ve gotten more adept at transitioning to and from the house, the car, and into the community, but I think through each step and anxiously guesstimate how long my oxygen concentrator’s battery will last and where can I plug it in if I run out of juice. The author describes my new world: “There’s a fundamental difference between the experience of a person who wakes up taking for granted that they will, of course, have access, and the one who wakes up and wonders whether they’ll have access, how they’ll find or fight for their access, and what they’ll do when they don’t have access.” |
Part of this systemic ability-prejudice comes from our capitalist culture, which maximizes productivity:
“We live in a world that rewards women [and me] who can push themselves beyond their maximum capacity, but not a single woman alive can maintain that push indefinitely.”
Corporate culture has “turned us into work machines who regularly abuse our bodies to demonstrate our value—sleep less, work harder, always! They’ve made us ashamed to ask for help, to take medications, to use mobility aids.”
The gift of altered ability is breaking this stranglehold of over-productivity. For example, not being able to drive and push through an eight-hour day opens up new, gentler ways to move through the world.
“We live in a world that rewards women [and me] who can push themselves beyond their maximum capacity, but not a single woman alive can maintain that push indefinitely.”
Corporate culture has “turned us into work machines who regularly abuse our bodies to demonstrate our value—sleep less, work harder, always! They’ve made us ashamed to ask for help, to take medications, to use mobility aids.”
The gift of altered ability is breaking this stranglehold of over-productivity. For example, not being able to drive and push through an eight-hour day opens up new, gentler ways to move through the world.
The author also critiques the role of differently-abled characters in literature and art. Disabled characters are often obsessed about a cure to restore normalcy. “It’s an old, uninformed, one-dimensional read on disability that burns on the stinky fuel of nondisabled fears.”
 | “Stories written about marginalized people embed themselves in our culture and are used to justify our politics, to arrange our school systems, to determine a hospital’s budget.” Narratives of disability are shorthand for “something incompetent and unreliable, helpless or dangerous, not worth living or inherently wrong, sinful, or contagious, impotent or taboo, perverted or sexless. And these manifest into tangible results from neglect to hate crimes, condescending laughter to sexual assault, unwelcome prayers to exorcisms, pity to assisted suicides, infantilization to police violence, dismissal to invasive medical procedures, familial rejection to domestic violence, idolization to social isolation.” |
One potential result is real-world violence against disabled and “othered” individuals. “...disabled women are three times more likely to be sexually assaulted than their nondisabled peers and [it’s estimated] that 80 percent of disabled women have survived sexual assault.”
“Maybe when someone’s difference scares you, that’s the precise moment to lean in …”
For me, it is such a kindness when waitstaff look me in the eye and treat me like a human being; when they look at me, not my machine and mask.
“If you want to be genuinely, actively real-deal ‘kind’ to disabled people . . . Recruit disabled engineers and dancers and office administrators and comedians and lawyers and speakers and teachers to participate in your world, and do your best to make that world accessible to them. ... including disabled people is a kindness to all of us. Because listening to voices that are typically silenced brings to the table nuance, endurance, creativity, beauty, innovation, and power.”
For me, it is such a kindness when waitstaff look me in the eye and treat me like a human being; when they look at me, not my machine and mask.
“If you want to be genuinely, actively real-deal ‘kind’ to disabled people . . . Recruit disabled engineers and dancers and office administrators and comedians and lawyers and speakers and teachers to participate in your world, and do your best to make that world accessible to them. ... including disabled people is a kindness to all of us. Because listening to voices that are typically silenced brings to the table nuance, endurance, creativity, beauty, innovation, and power.”
 | “Let’s agree that disabled people are an essential, vibrant part of our world [and] deserve to be treated as such.” Many accommodations made to assist disabled bodies benefit everyone. “When curb-cuts were originally designed, the idea was to create accommodations for wheelchair users. … But something else happened, too. Parents pushing strollers found trips around the block a bit easier. And so did people on bikes and scooters, people rolling luggage, vendors with food carts …” Closed-captioning helps folks with hearing impairments access video content, but it’s also great for understanding thick accents or if you want to mute the TV and follow along. Everybody wins. |
The author dares to dream of an inclusive, accessible world:
“An accessible future is shaped by the fundamental understanding that we all have bodies, that those bodies are different from one another, and each is worthy of profound admiration, care, and respect. The aging body, the female body, the body in pain, the injured or sick body, the fat or short or asymmetrical body, the racially stigmatized body, the body that needs to use the bathroom, the blind, deaf, paralyzed, tired, nonbinary, hungry, bleeding, transitioning, seizing body. Every single one. … This future won’t appear out of thin air; we have to create it—little by little—as we practice listening to, caring for, and respecting all of our bodies. Please. Let’s create this world for each other.”
“An accessible future is shaped by the fundamental understanding that we all have bodies, that those bodies are different from one another, and each is worthy of profound admiration, care, and respect. The aging body, the female body, the body in pain, the injured or sick body, the fat or short or asymmetrical body, the racially stigmatized body, the body that needs to use the bathroom, the blind, deaf, paralyzed, tired, nonbinary, hungry, bleeding, transitioning, seizing body. Every single one. … This future won’t appear out of thin air; we have to create it—little by little—as we practice listening to, caring for, and respecting all of our bodies. Please. Let’s create this world for each other.”
Sitting Pretty had many more insightful observations than I can include in this review, but I’ll close with two powerful quotes:
“Maybe there aren’t happy endings, maybe life is more like a bowl of soup flavored with contentment and angst, victories and heartbreaks, joys and defeats, rage and peace, and maybe it’s a special thing when you get to share that soup with anyone.”
And: “…all of our bodies carry a multitude of strengths and failures, and sometimes those are one and the same.”
Highly recommended.
“Maybe there aren’t happy endings, maybe life is more like a bowl of soup flavored with contentment and angst, victories and heartbreaks, joys and defeats, rage and peace, and maybe it’s a special thing when you get to share that soup with anyone.”
And: “…all of our bodies carry a multitude of strengths and failures, and sometimes those are one and the same.”
Highly recommended.
Read more about differently-abled bodies: Being Seen, Disability Visibility, Disability Intimacy
Read fiction from wide-ranging perspectives: Amplitudes, So Many Beginnings,
The Remarkable Retirement of Edna Fischer, Someone to Build a Nest In
Read fiction from wide-ranging perspectives: Amplitudes, So Many Beginnings,
The Remarkable Retirement of Edna Fischer, Someone to Build a Nest In
