Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg

Emily Rapp Black

Jun 2021 · New York Review of Books

About this ebook

A New York Times-bestselling author's personal examination of how the experiences, art, and disabilities of Frida Kahlo shaped her life as an amputee.

At first sight of Frida Kahlo’s painting The Two Fridas, Emily Rapp Black felt a connection with the artist. An amputee from childhood, Rapp Black grew up with a succession of prosthetic limbs and learned that she had to hide her disability from the world. 

Kahlo sustained lifelong injuries after a horrific bus crash, and her right leg was eventually amputated. In Kahlo’s art, Rapp Black recognized her own life, from the numerous operations to the compulsion to create to silence pain. Here she tells her story of losing her infant son to Tay-Sachs, giving birth to a daughter, and learning to accept her body. She writes of how Frida Kahlo inspired her to find a way forward when all seemed lost.



Book cover image: Frida Kahlo, prosthetic limb. Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera Archives. Bank of Mexico, Fiduciary in the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museum Trust.

About the author

Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir and The Still Point of the Turning World, a New York Times bestseller and an Editors’ Pick. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Vogue; The New York Times; Time; The Wall Street Journal; O, The Oprah Magazine; and the Los Angeles Times. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review and is the nonfiction editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Rapp is currently an associate professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, where she also teaches medical narratives in the university’s School of Medicine.