Poster Child

the long version

Emily Rapp was born with a birth defect that required, at the age of four, that her left foot be amputated. By the time she was eight she'd had dozens of operations and had lost her entire leg from just above the knee. She had also become the smiling, always perky, indefatigable poster child for the March of Dimes, and spent much of her childhood traveling around Wyoming making appearances and giving pep talks. All the while she was learning to live with what she later called "my grievous, irrevocable flaw." This is Rapp's brutally honest and often darkly humorous account of wrestling with the tyranny of self-image as a teenager and then ultimately coming to terms with her own body as a young woman. It's about what it's like to live inside a broken body in a society that values beauty above almost everything else.--From publisher description.