My nightstand is a graveyard of books left open and abandoned. It isn’t their fault really. It’s hard to slow down a racing mind, especially one that works in media, reading words all day long. Before quarantine, I would read on the bus or before a meeting, or on my lunch break. My home is my office now and that means I work late into the night—there isn’t a clear line of when to “clock out.” Books have subsequently taken a back seat.
Golem, in Jewish folklore, is a clay figure brought to life through magic. It is meant to reference something unfinished, like a monster. In Golem Girl Lehrer takes back the meaning of the word, reappropriating it, and referencing it frequently as she finds her place in the world. She proves that she’s a force to be reckoned with.
“For most of my life, I had glanced at impairment and looked away, afraid to see myself. Now I looked slowly and deliberately. I let the sight come to me. And beauty arrived,” she writes as she dives into the world of portraiture outside of self-portraiture and into her new community “I wanted crip beauty—variant, iconoclastic, unpredictable. Bodies that were lived in with intentionality and self-knowledge. Crip bodies were fresh.” v
