A memoir by a disability rights activist
Such a Pretty Girl is Nadina LaSpina's story-from her early years in
her native Sicily, where still a baby she contracts polio, a fact that
makes her the object of well-meaning pity and the target of messages of
hopelessness; to her adolescence and youth in America, spent almost
entirely in hospitals, where she is tortured in the quest for a cure and
made to feel that her body no longer belongs to her; to her rebellion
and her activism in the disability rights movement.
LaSpina's personal growth parallels the movement's political
development-from coming together, organizing, and fighting against
exclusion from public and social life, to the forging of a common
identity, the blossoming of disability arts and culture, and the
embracing of disability pride.
While unique, the author's journey is also one with which many disabled
people can identify. It is the journey to find one's place in an ableist
world-a world not made for disabled people, where disability is only
seen in negative terms. La Spina refutes all stereotypical narratives of
disability. Through the telling of her life's story, without
editorializing, she shows the harm that the overwhelming focus on pity
and on a cure that remains elusive has done to disabled people. Her
story exposes the disability prejudice ingrained in our sociopolitical
system and denounces the oppressive standards of normalcy in a society
that devalues those who are different and denies them basic rights.
Written as continuous narrative and in a subtle and intimate voice,
Such a Pretty Girl is a memoir as captivating as a novel. It is one of
the few disability memoirs to focus on activism, and one of the first by
an immigrant.
