My Withered Legs and Other Essays

Lambert has the rare ability to make you feel invited into her life despite the fact that she is so thoroughly pissed off. At the heart of these essays you’ll find camaraderie, humor, raw honesty, and cathartic anger toward an ableist infrastructure, and an ageist one. While this anger gives the collection a political heart, and an analytical dimension, it is Sandra’s life, loves, adventures, and reflections that give the collection its grace and style. The emotional range of the book is impressive―the narrator cares for her aging mother, falls in love with her wife, gets sick (in an almost Tig Notaro-esque cascade of calamities), becomes a successful writer, reflects on childhood disability, moves through the outdoors, and laughs uproariously with her friends. There were too many moments to count when I felt just utterly charmed by the narrator’s heart, by her sense of humor. -- Aisha Sabatini Sloan ― author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning Borealis

Sandra Gail Lambert's My Withered Legs and Other Essays is a wonderful collection of gripping, moving, occasionally lusty, always empowering observations that ring with truth. Lambert's storytelling style is sharp, vivid, and propulsive. This is the sort of book you won’t soon forget. -- Ben Mattlin ― author of Disability Pride: Dispatches from a Post-ADA World

Lambert has the rare ability to make you feel invited into her life despite the fact that she is so thoroughly pissed off. At the heart of these essays you’ll find camaraderie, humor, raw honesty, and cathartic anger toward an ableist infrastructure, and an ageist one. While this anger gives the collection a political heart, and an analytical dimension, it is Sandra’s life, loves, adventures, and reflections that give the collection its grace and style. The emotional range of the book is impressive—the narrator cares for her aging mother, falls in love with her wife, gets sick (in an almost Tig Notaro-esque cascade of calamities), becomes a successful writer, reflects on childhood disability, moves through the outdoors, and laughs uproariously with her friends. There were too many moments to count when I felt just utterly charmed by the narrator’s heart, by her sense of humor.

Sandra Gail Lambert's My Withered Legs and Other Essays is a wonderful collection of gripping, moving, occasionally lusty, always empowering observations that ring with truth. Lambert's storytelling style is sharp, vivid, and propulsive. This is the sort of book you won’t soon forget.