This article first appeared in The Kansas City Star on March 3, 2025.

If you live long enough, you’ll be disabled. 

When Rebekah Taussig says this, she doesn’t mean it as a threat or to be a downer. It’s just a fact that she explores in her book, Sitting Pretty, the KC Pop-up Book Group’s spring pick. 

The Kansas Citian, who lost the use of her legs as a toddler, is a disability advocate, writer and podcaster who wants to see society better anticipate the ordinary evolution of the human body. 

“There’s a really strong narrative in our culture that our bodies should be strong and independent and that we – even when our bodies start to fall apart – keep pushing and pretending that they’re not,” Taussig said. 

Though her book has been out for five years, the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read has given it renewed attention. The NEA listed it alongside 28 other titles, including classics like Toni Morrison’s Beloved and contemporary works like There There by Tommy Orange, for libraries nationwide to use to create Big Read programming this spring. 

Sitting Pretty, a memoir in eight essays, includes a story about Taussig’s search for housing several years ago that made her feel, if not actively unwanted by her city, then definitely not thought of, she wrote. 

“And what a surreal feeling to have this very literal experience that says, like, ‘Oh no, we see you,’ you know, ‘we want to see you,’” Taussig said. 

According to her book, conversations about disability are rooted in two starting places: a medical model and a social model. 

The medical model treats disability – temporary or lifelong – as a tragedy an individual and their family must endure and try to solve with a medical team. 

On the other hand, the social model, which is what Taussig is a proponent of, reframes the conversation about disability as a social experience that’s so common that it should guide the way communities are built, and societies are structured. 

“When we are invested in thinking about disability this way, in the way of holding more humans and caring for ourselves,” she said, “it’s not like, ‘Let’s care for this very fringe group of people over here,’ but it’s like, ‘Oh, wow. This is important for all of us.’” 

She’s already talking to her 4-year-old son about the idea. 

While playing with blocks recently, Otto decided he could no longer use a Mario figurine because its leg was missing. 

After she explained that he could keep playing with it, Otto said that he felt scared to lose an arm or leg. 

Regardless of our age, she said, “we don’t want to grapple with the vulnerabilities of living in a body.” 

The element of fear extends from what will happen to our own bodies to fear of people who already live with a disability. 

“We can get scared,” she said to him, “but that doesn’t mean that those people are scary. That doesn’t mean that we turn away and don’t talk to them.” 

She assumed Otto would grow up comfortable with the idea of people in wheelchairs, but she wasn’t sure if that would translate to comfort with someone with impaired vision or missing a hand. 

It turned out that even a motorized wheelchair struck him as noteworthy; hers is not motorized. 

When he was not quite 3, they saw someone using one and, she recalled, Otto “literally got out his pointer finger and said really loudly, ‘What happened?’ I was like, are you kidding me?” 

But for them, and she hopes for other families, that kind of interaction can be a starting place to talk about different bodies — what she describes as “an infinite range of human beings and the shapes that we show up in and the ways that we move through the world.” 

Taussig said she feels emotional about the NEA Big Read listing and overwhelmed that the Kansas City Public Library chose to focus on the book both for the KC Pop-up Book Group and the Big Read. 

She said, “I feel teary-eyed about it, that my community wants to have these conversations … and cautiously hopeful that this would actually lead to meaningful shifts in how we show up as a community in Kansas City.” 

JOIN THE GROUP 

The Kansas City Star partners with the Kansas City Public Library to present a book-of-the-moment selection. We invite the community to read along. Kaite Mediatore Stover, the Library’s director of readers’ services, will lead a discussion of Rebekah Taussig’s Sitting Pretty, at 1 p.m. on Saturday, March 29, at the library’s North-East Branch, 6000 Wilson Ave. Email Stover at kaitestover@kclibrary.org to join.