Reviewed by Ona Gritz
Had we grown up together, Sandra Gail Lambert would never have chosen me for a friend. I’d have watched from the sidelines in the playground and longed to connect with this girl who was both visibly disabled and completely comfortable in her body. And I’d know by the way she ignored me that she sensed how I felt about my own physical limitations: not just ashamed, which would be bad enough, but as though I owed the mostly able-bodied world around us an apology for sharing their space.
“Ten-year-old me had no concern for kids with disabilities who weren’t strong in the same way I was,” Lambert tells us in the opening essay of her fiery and compelling new collection, My Withered Legs and Other Essays. And also this: “The harder something was, the more accomplished I felt…get out of my way, just try to stop me, shut up, you won’t win, I can outlast you.”
What I marvel at most here is that this self-assuredness, this verve, was not the culmination of a long struggle and evolution for Lambert. It was her starting point. Lambert, who had polio as a child and went from using crutches to eventually choosing the relative ease and speed of a motorized chair, has always known she has value. Add to this that her writing is crisp, authentic, witty, and utterly captivating and we have a book that is essential reading both within and beyond the disability community.
“With disability there has always been the honing down of what is possible to what is most important. It has given me clarity and self-governance.” Here is that feisty, capable girl, grown now, a woman to be reckoned with. She is clear-eyed, always, mindful of the dangers of living in a society that views our lives as lesser. “I’d spent a lifetime proofing myself against being the first one thrown out of the lifeboat.” But even as she takes us with her to peer over the abyss, we’re safer in her company. For she is still asserting her value and, by association, our own.
While the title may lead you to believe My Withered Legs is centered on disability, it’s about that and so much more. New and established love. Lesbian community and chosen family. The role reversal that’s required when a parent—in this case, a difficult one—begins to lose capacity and move toward death. Lambert writes about ableism and assumptions, about growing older and about falling (which she calls the “great divide for the aging”).
In the wrenching and beautiful braided essay that closes the book, she writes about the balancing act her life became when illness arrived concurrently with literary success. As is true of all my favorite memoirists, her tone is candid and confiding, but somehow, with Lambert, it goes beyond that. She has a way of having readers feel like we’re among the initiated. We’re privy to the intimacies of her body and her marriage, her most vulnerable moments and innermost thoughts, including a few, as she admits, she’s yet to reveal to her wife. All of these experiences are shared with frankness and humor, wisdom and reflection. She’s like that rare friend who can get you thinking about life in new and profound ways, but who also makes you laugh until you pee.
Take, for example, Lambert on romantic relationships. Nearing the end of her first dinner out with Pam, the woman who will become her wife, she’s crestfallen because she “…couldn’t carry off the ninety minutes of not being weird required by a first date.” When things progress to the point that Pam will be moving in: “I worry that I’ll be too…well, me.”
Her quips aside, Lambert is deeply invested in evolving as a partner, and also as a daughter, friend, and writer, a profession she first pursued in middle age. “It helps that I had some extra decades of living before my writing was read by anyone,” she says. “This added emotional steadiness offers perspective, but not necessarily right away…I spend time secretly bouncing between two-year-old temper tantrums and a teenager’s angst when critiqued.” Here, and throughout the collection, her raw honesty and self-deprecating wit make her both an enchanting companion and a trusted guide, so that when she learns, we learn with her. As Lambert tells us, “…Better description, digging deeper, writing honestly–all these…are very good advice. So I glean…what’s useful…I deserve the chance to become a better writer.”
Sandra Gail Lambert is, in fact, a masterful writer, and the essays in her new collection are a tremendous gift. Through them, even those of us who were once meek and apologetic disabled children, are invited to join her at her side—a place where the juicy and the real happen. The life Lambert describes is full of pleasure, love, friendship, and plenty of obstacles. But as she brilliantly reminds the writers among us, “Our talent, our skills, our perseverance, and our wild joy in writing are not despite obstacles. They arise out of the supposed dead ends and loop-de-loops of our lives.”
Title: My Withered Legs and Other Essays
Author: Sandra Gail Lambert
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Year: 2024
Read reviews of Ona Gritz’s books, The Space You Left Behind, and Everywhere I Look: A Memoir, in this issue of Wordgathering.
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About the Reviewer
Ona Gritz’s new memoir, Everywhere I Look, won the Readers’ Choice Gold Award for Best Adult Book, the Independent Author Award in New Nonfiction, the Independent Author Award in True Crime, and is an Independent Book Review 2024 Must-Read. The blog editor for Wordgathering, her nonfiction has appeared widely, including in The New York Times, The Guardian, Brevity, Parents, and River Teeth. Among her recent honors are two Notable mentions in The Best American Essays and a Best Life Story in Salon. The Space You Left Behind, Ona’s first young adult novel, written in verse, has just been released from West 44 Books and is featured in The Children’s Book Council’s Hot Off the Press roundup of anticipated best sellers.