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Point of View

“…the summer I agreed to do things I didn’t want to do and laughed at jokes that weren’t funny. I had just turned sixteen, and what I wanted more than anything else in life was to be beautiful. I didn’t care about being smart, successful, or good. In fact, I believed that beauty was the prerequisite for achieving any of those other qualities”
– Poster Child, Emily Rapp, page 128

Emily Rapp writing in first-person narrative is not a unique style for a memoir. Her coming of age chapters, too, are not entirely unique. They are different in the way that the vast majority of us do not have to worry about matching our prosthetic leg to our flesh leg, which has obviously been a theme in this book. That’s what she wants us to care about, in theory—her time living and growing and rolling with the punches of being disabled. And no doubt, that there were memorable moments in the chapters that revolved around her leg and the trouble of being insecure because of it and asking for a different model and so forth. But what was really poignant in her writing, to me, was when she didn’t talk about her leg. Because in her desperation to be just any other girl, she was, and I don’t think she even realized it. And through her perspective of counting calories, and laughing at jokes that weren’t funny and just over everything wanting to be pretty—she is, just another girl. And we’ve been reading the whole book so far and she’s always been highlighting what sets her apart, but coming of age and those growing pains, that’s seemingly universal.

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