March 2025

“This is the wild emancipation I wish for all of us—a world where we are all free to be, to move, to exist in our bodies without shame…a world that instead strives to invite more, include more, imagine more.”

Author Rebekah Taussig has been paralyzed from the waist down since she was about two years old. Growing up in the 1990s and 2000s, the few depictions of a person with disabilities she saw ranged from monstrous to inspirational to angelic—but none of them ever felt like a reflection of her own experiences. Taussig craved complicated stories about disability that reflected the nuances of her own body and life. Since starting her popular Instagram account @sitting_pretty, Taussig has focused on what it means to live in a body that doesn’t fit. 

Taussig builds her memoir Sitting Pretty around essays about her complex relationship with her disability, her disability’s impact on her other relationships, and how she navigates a largely able-bodied world. She examines how disability shapes people’s lives, delving into perceptions of kindness, charity, and the everyday presence of ableism in the media.