Quick Take
- Narration: Riva Lehrer reads her own work with an artist’s ear, her voice carries the manuscript’s visual richness in a way no outside narrator could replicate.
- Themes: Disability identity and culture, portraiture as collaborative practice, the politics of the body and normalcy
- Mood: Lyrical and unflinching, moving between dark institutional history and fierce creative joy
- Verdict: A major work in disability literature, and the audio production’s embedded image descriptions make this version more complete than it might initially seem.
There are a handful of memoirs I return to not because they comfort me but because they realign something in how I read everything else. Riva Lehrer’s Golem Girl is one of those books. I finished it on a long flight home from a literary conference, headphones in while the cabin lights dimmed, and I found myself repeatedly pausing the recording not because the content was difficult, though it is, sometimes, but because I needed a moment to register what I had just heard. Lehrer is a visual artist, and the prose has the quality of someone who thinks first in images: dense, precise, full of color and texture and the specific weight of objects.
The golem of the title is an old Jewish concept: a being made of clay, brought to life by human hands, existing in a liminal space between creature and creation. Lehrer, born in 1958 with spina bifida at a time when most children with the condition were not expected to survive, reaches for this figure to describe her own experience of being treated as a body that needed to be fixed. “What do we sacrifice in the pursuit of normalcy?” the synopsis asks. “And what becomes possible when we embrace monstrosity?” These are not rhetorical questions. They are the structural beams of the entire book.
The Portraits That Rebuilt Her
The memoir’s spine is a series of collaborative portrait paintings that Lehrer undertook after joining a community of disabled artists, writers, and performers building what she calls Disability Culture. Each portrait became a negotiation: the subjects helped shape how they were depicted, and the process of working through that negotiation changed what Lehrer understood about her own body and about representation. The resulting portraits are included in the book, and the audio production handles this with unusual thoughtfulness. There is a PDF of illustrations, and crucially, the images are also described aurally within the audiobook itself, making the visual argument accessible to listeners who cannot see the pages. For a book fundamentally about how bodies are seen and depicted, this is the right choice.
A Social History Embedded in a Life
Lehrer’s memoir is also, as David Mitchell accurately notes in his blurb, “an unflinching social history of disability over the last six decades.” The medical interventions of her childhood, the surgeries, the attempts at cure, the institutional framework that treated her as a problem to be solved, are rendered with documentary precision alongside their emotional weight. Lehrer is not interested in making you feel bad for her; she is interested in making you understand the architecture of how disabled bodies have been managed and perceived. The Disability Culture community she eventually finds and helps build is described with a warmth that earns its weight because the book has been so clear-eyed about what it took to get there.
Self-Narration as an Artistic Statement
Lehrer reading her own work is not merely a convenience or a commercial choice. There is something philosophically appropriate about a book concerned with who gets to speak for bodies like hers being spoken in Lehrer’s own voice. She reads with the cadence of someone who has given many readings: comfortable with the prose, willing to let the harder passages breathe, finding the rhythm of the longer sentences without losing the listener. At fourteen hours, this is a substantial listen, but the visual richness of the prose gives the audio something to work with at every stage. The density that might slow a print reader actually advantages the audio experience, where you cannot skim.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Skip
Golem Girl rewards listeners who come prepared for something layered and serious. This is not a recovery narrative in any conventional sense, and it is not organized around a single dramatic arc. It moves associatively, as a visual artist thinks, and some sections require sitting with ambiguity. Listeners who found benefit in Suleika Jaouad’s Between Two Kingdoms or Alice Wong’s Disability Visibility anthology will find themselves in recognizable territory, though Lehrer’s aesthetic register is denser than either. Those looking for a lighter memoir about overcoming adversity will find this book’s refusal of that framework clarifying but possibly frustrating.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does the audiobook handle the portrait illustrations that appear in the print edition?
The audio production includes both a PDF of the illustrations and aural descriptions of the images embedded in the recording itself. This means the visual argument at the heart of the book remains accessible to audio listeners, which is unusual and thoughtful production work.
Is this memoir primarily about Lehrer’s medical experiences growing up, or does it cover her adult life and artistic career equally?
The memoir covers both extensively. The childhood medical sections establish the context of how her body was treated, but the later sections about joining Disability Culture, developing her portrait practice, and her adult relationships and creative life take up significant space and carry much of the book’s emotional force.
Does the book require familiarity with the Chicago art world or Disability Culture to be meaningful?
No. Lehrer introduces the community of artists and activists she encounters with enough context that readers without prior knowledge of either the Chicago art scene or Disability Culture will follow along easily. The portraits are described and discussed within the text in ways that make them accessible without background knowledge.
At 14 hours, does Golem Girl work better in long stretches or across multiple shorter sessions?
The associative, chapter-based structure makes it well-suited to multiple shorter sessions rather than marathon listening. Each chapter tends to build around a specific person, period, or portrait, so there are natural pause points that do not disrupt the book’s cumulative effect.
