Golem Girl: A Memoir

by Riva Lehrer

Overview

The vividly told, gloriously illustrated memoir of an artist born with disabilities who searches for freedom and connection in a society afraid of strange bodies

“Golem Girl is 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.”—David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas

WINNER OF THE BARBELLION PRIZE • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHY • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS

What do we sacrifice in the pursuit of normalcy? And what becomes possible when we embrace monstrosity? Can we envision a world that sees impossible creatures?

In 1958, amongst the children born with spina bifida is Riva Lehrer. At the time, most such children are not expected to survive. Her parents and doctors are determined to "fix" her, sending the message over and over again that she is broken. That she will never have a job, a romantic relationship, or an independent life. Enduring countless medical interventions, Riva tries her best to be a good girl and a good patient in the quest to be cured.

Everything changes when, as an adult, Riva is invited to join a group of artists, writers, and performers who are building Disability Culture. Their work is daring, edgy, funny, and dark—it rejects tropes that define disabled people as pathetic, frightening, or worthless. They insist that disability is an opportunity for creativity and resistance. Emboldened, Riva asks if she can paint their portraits—inventing an intimate and collaborative process that will transform the way she sees herself, others, and the world. Each portrait story begins to transform the myths she’s been told her whole life about her body, her sexuality, and other measures of normal.

Written with the vivid, cinematic prose of a visual artist, and the love and playfulness that defines all of Riva's work, Golem Girl is an extraordinary story of tenacity and creativity. With the author's magnificent portraits featured throughout, this memoir invites us to stretch ourselves toward a world where bodies flow between all possible forms of what it is to be human.

“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!”—Alice Wong, founder and director, Disability Visibility Project 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781984820327
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/26/2021
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	222,098
Product dimensions:	6.19(w) x 9.26(h) x 1.14(d)

About the Author

Riva Lehrer is an artist, writer, and curator whose work focuses on issues of physical identity and the socially challenged body. She is best known for representations of people with impairments, and those whose sexuality or gender identity have long been stigmatized. A longtime faculty member of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Riva Lehrer is currently an instructor in medical humanities at Northwestern University.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue


The Latin roots of “monster” are monere, meaning “to warn,” and monstrum, an omen, or a supernatural being that indicates the will of a god. “Monster” shares its etymological root with “premonition” and “demonstrate.”

My first monster story was Frankenstein.

Though this first Creature was more James Whale than Mary Shelley. When we were little, my brothers and I would abandon the great outdoors and race inside in time for the Saturday monster movie matinee. Two hours of ecstatic dread. Of delicious nightmares in chiaroscuro black-and-white.

Every few weeks, it would be his turn. I waited for his graceless body, his halting gait and cinder-block shoes. I could recognize the operating room where he was born. I knew he was real, because we were the same—everything that made him a monster made me one, too. We had more in common than scars and shoes. Frankenstein is the story of a disabled child and its parent. It is also the story of a Golem.

Humans have told stories of magically animated creatures for thousands of years. Ancient religions from Babylonia and Sumer, to Mexico, Africa, and China, all assert that gods formed the first human beings out of clay. Enki and Prometheus are but two creators who formed a being and gave it life. These days, we have Victor Frankenstein and his Creature, but long before them, the Jews had Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel and his Golem.

Golem (goylem in Yiddish) is Hebrew for “shapeless mass” and first appears in Psalm 139 of the Hebrew Bible, in which Adam is referred to as a golmi. Adam is brought to life by the breath—the word—of God, transformed from inert matter into vibrant life: the first Golem. The difference is that Adam becomes fully human, while Golems of legend never do.

Iterations of this legend date from as far back as the eleventh century, but the most famous version dates from sixteenth-century Prague. The Golem of Prague tells the story of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (an actual historical figure, known as the Maharal) and his creation of a living being made of clay. Golems wend through our stories, from Pygmalion’s statue to the Bride of Frankenstein to Mr. Data and Seven of Nine; from the Cylons to C-3PO, R2-D2, and Chucky the doll. And, of course, to Gollum himself.

While these are not all Golems, exactly, every creature is made of inanimate material that is shaped and awakened by the will of a master (and nearly every story is of a master—not a mater—a male who attempts to attain the generative power of the female body).

Golems are built in order to serve a specific purpose. Adam, it is said, was built for the glory of God. The Golem of Prague was built to save the Jews from a pogrom. Frankenstein’s monster was built for the glory of his maker, and for the glory of science itself. These Golems were not created for their own sake. None given purposes of their own, or futures under their control. Golems are permitted to exist only if they conform to the wishes of their masters. When a Golem determines its own purpose—let’s call it hubris—it is almost always destroyed. The

Golem must stay unconscious of its own existence in order to remain a receptacle of divine will.

Yet every tale tells us: it is in the nature of a Golem to wake up. To search for the path from being an It to an I.

In Golem stories, the monster is often disabled. Speechless and somnambulistic, a marionette acting on dreams and animal instinct. In Yiddish, one meaning of goylem is “lummox”; to quote the scholar Michael Chemers, from God’s perspective, all humans are disabled. The day I was born I was a mass, a body with irregular borders. The shape of my body was pared away according to normal outlines, but this normalcy didn’t last very long. My body insisted on aberrance. I was denied the autonomy that is the birthright of normality. Doctors foretold that I would be a “vegetable,” a thing without volition or self-awareness. Children like me were saved without purpose, at least not any purpose we could call our own.

I am a Golem. My body was built by human hands.

And yet—

If I once was monere, I’m turning myself into monstrare: one who unveils.

Table of Contents

Prologue xiii

Part 1

Chapter 1 Carole's Story: It's Alive! 5

Chapter 2 Cauda Equina 13

Chapter 3 Carole's Story: Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman 16

Chapter 4 Carole's Story: The Girl with All the Gifts 18

Chapter 5 Leprechaun 21

Chapter 6 We Have Always Lived in the Castle 23

Chapter 7 The Island of Dr. Moreau 29

Chapter 8 Heidi 35

Chapter 9 Aerobicide 43

Chapter 10 House of Wax 51

Chapter 11 Have Fun Storming the Castle 58

Chapter 12 Gooble Gobble 62

Chapter 13 Body Parts 67

Chapter 14 The Cabin in the Woods 75

Chapter 15 Carole's Story: The Winter Walk 81

Chapter 16 The Abominable Dr. Phibes 85

Chapter 17 Attack of the Killer Tomatoes 95

Chapter 18 Vampire's Kiss 101

Chapter 19 The Changeling 111

Chapter 20 A Sweetness in the Blood 117

Chapter 21 Cissy Inventing the Pantheon 129

Chapter 22 I Was a Teenage Werewolf 131

Chapter 23 Curse of the Spider Woman 135

Chapter 24 Face/Off 140

Chapter 25 The Red Shoes 143

Chapter 26 There Will Be Blood 145

Chapter 27 There Will Be (More) Blood 149

Chapter 28 Friday the 13th 157

Chapter 29 Armageddon 161

Part 2

Chapter 30 The Birds 171

Chapter 31 Art School Confidential 174

Chapter 32 The Man Who Fell to Earth 176

Chapter 33 What Music They Make 184

Chapter 34 Shrek 189

Chapter 35 Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal 192

Chapter 36 The Haunting of Hill House 195

Chapter 37 Suspiria 199

Chapter 38 Gone Girl 205

Chapter 39 Graveyard Shift 210

Chapter 40 The Bride of Frankenstein 215

Chapter 41 The Tell-Tale Heart 223

Chapter 42 Picnic at Hanging Rock 227

Chapter 43 Nerve Endings 233

Chapter 44 The Picture of Dorian Gray 236

Chapter 45 One of Us 240

Chapter 46 Night Gallery 249

Chapter 47 The Woods 265

Chapter 48 I Know What You Did Last Summer 269

Chapter 49 Theater of Blood 272

Chapter 50 Phantom of the Opera 283

Chapter 51 Cat People 293

Chapter 52 American Horror Story 301

Chapter 53 The Pit and the Pendulum 307

Chapter 54 The Fall of the House of Usher 310

Chapter 55 The Invisible Man 313

Chapter 56 The Company of Wolves 319

Chapter 57 I See Dead People 329

Chapter 58 Invasion of the Body Snatchers 335

Chapter 59 Freaks 343

Chapter 60 The Skin We Live In 349

Chapter 61 Gollum 355

Golem I 364

Golem II 366

Epilogue(s) 369

The Portraits 373

List of Illustrations 409

Resources 419

Acknowledgments 421

Editorial Reviews

[A] penetrating and razor-witted debut . . . Brainy . . . sexy and soulful, Lehrer’s writing exhibits the force of will needed to make one’s way in a culture where, ‘If it’s medically possible to push a body toward that social ideal, then we make it a moral imperative to do so.’ . . . With vast ambition and the skill to match, Lehrer examines learning on every level—learning to live, to forgive, to create, to love, and to become a part of various communities: familial, queer, disabled and artistic. . . . Packed with photographs of her own life as well as about fifty reproductions of her brilliant portraiture, this daring opus stands as a fittingly visual testament to the ‘radical visibility’ she advocates as a teacher and a person—a beautiful meditation on monstrousness, bodies and the souls they contain.”—Minneapolis StarTribune

“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.”—Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home

“Like Patti Smith and Sally Mann, Lehrer opens a vein and spills wisdom and humor, lyricism, and conviction onto the page. She teaches us with images and words that all bodies are exquisite, just as they are. Lehrer’s life and art is an example of the deepest creativity and resistance.”—Ayelet Waldman, author of A Really Good Day

“Riva Lehrer is a great artist and a great storyteller. This is a brilliant book, full of strangeness, beauty, and wonder.”—Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife

“Vivid and 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 openheartedness.”—Andrew Solomon, author of Far From the Tree

“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.”—Nicola Griffith, author of Hild

“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.”—Stephen Asma, author of On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

“A wincing-wise tale, by turns harrowing and hilarious, cut clean through with flecks of grace and beauty.”—Lawrence Weschler, author of Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees

From the Publisher

08/10/2020

Painter Lehrer applies the same unflinching gaze for which her portraits are known to a lifetime with spina bifida in this trenchant debut memoir of disability and queer culture. Born in 1958, Lehrer was among the first to benefit from a surgical breakthrough that enabled doctors to save the lives of newborns with her condition. In the book’s first half, Lehrer recounts finding uninhibited joy with other disabled children at Cincinnati’s Condon School, as well as some unnecessary and ultimately harmful medical procedures she endured. At 21 and living in Chicago, she discovered an exuberant sexuality—one she believed wasn’t possible for her—and grappled with feeling marginalized due to her queerness. The book’s second half, however, loses some of the intimacy as Lehrer adopts a more didactic tone to describe a succession of relationships and document the rise of her career as an artist and the way her work explores the intersections of gender, sexuality, and disability (she includes photos and her own illustrations throughout). Lehrer notes that “international debates (such as those in Belgium and the Netherlands) persist over whether to treat infants like me at all,” and observes that “disability is the great billboard of human truth.... Add it to any discourse, and we can see what humanity truly values.” Readers will be sucked into Lehrer’s powerful memoir. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Artist, writer, and person living from birth into her seventh decade in what she terms a “socially challenged body,” Riva Lehrer proves to be an engaging memoirist and a clear-voiced narrator with an excellent sense of pacing. Spina bifida has characterized her body without serving as the sole focus of either her own or her family’s life. She moves us from her difficult birth through a childhood and adolescence of discovering both her physical and intellectual capacities, drawing listeners into reconsidering cultural assumptions and the need for each of us to locate social identity. More than an hour at the end of the memoir is given to an equally satisfying program in which narrator Cassandra Campbell delivers text written by Briana Beck that gives listeners what she calls “verbal interpretations of the visual images included in the printed book.” F.M.R.G. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2020 - AudioFile

Artist, writer, and person living from birth into her seventh decade in what she terms a “socially challenged body,” Riva Lehrer proves to be an engaging memoirist and a clear-voiced narrator with an excellent sense of pacing. Spina bifida has characterized her body without serving as the sole focus of either her own or her family’s life. She moves us from her difficult birth through a childhood and adolescence of discovering both her physical and intellectual capacities, drawing listeners into reconsidering cultural assumptions and the need for each of us to locate social identity. More than an hour at the end of the memoir is given to an equally satisfying program in which narrator Cassandra Campbell delivers text written by Briana Beck that gives listeners what she calls “verbal interpretations of the visual images included in the printed book.” F.M.R.G. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2020 - AudioFile

★ 2020-09-16
An artist born with spina bifida shares her story and her paintings with grace and humor.

“What’s wrong with her?” As a child, writes Lehrer, when a stranger would callously ask that question, “to my dismay, Mom would provide all they’d need to win the vacation package and the new Cadillac. She laid out the details of spina bifida, its causes and effects, as if deputizing a city-wide cadre in case I had to be rushed to an emergency room. For me, this kind of visibility was like being scraped along the sidewalk.” Lehrer, whose paintings of what she calls “socially challenged bod[ies]” hang in the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian and many other museums, narrates her difficult childhood with an eloquence and freedom from self-pity that are every bit as powerful as those of Lucy Grealy in her Autobiography of a Face (1994). Remarkably, Lehrer, now 62, found a way to survive endless surgeries (many of them completely bungled) and irremediable pain to create a successful life—one that readers will relish learning about. Her evolving self-awareness as an artist, a disabled person, and a woman with a complicated sexuality are well-explored, and her prose ranges from light and entertaining to intellectually and emotionally serious—and always memorable. In explaining a period when she took up painting beds, she writes, “Beds are crossroads, where impairment and sexuality intersect, the mattress a palimpsest of ecstasy and hurt.” The memoir is illustrated with photographs of family and friends and color images of Lehrer’s paintings. In an appendix—a bonus book within the book—she goes back to each of the portraits and shares anecdotes about her process and her interaction with the subject, often including that person’s own account. In one of her series, The Risk Pictures, Lehrer leaves the subject alone with the canvas for an hour and instructs them to alter it however they want.

An extraordinary memoir suffused with generosity, consistent insight, and striking artwork.

Kirkus Reviews