Episode 30: Emily Rapp Black Discusses Frida Kahlo

After seeing Frida Kahlo’s painting “The Two Fridas,” writer and professor Emily Rapp Black felt an intense connection with the famous Mexican artist—maybe one of the most recognized faces in the world. Rapp Black has been an amputee since childhood. She grew up with a succession of prosthetic limbs, and learned to hide her disability from the world. Kahlo, too, was an amputee, having sustained lifelong injuries after a horrific bus crash during her teenage years, eventually leading to her right leg being amputated. In Kahlo's life and art, Rapp Black saw her own life, from numerous operations to the compulsion to create pain silences. Rapp Black—an award-winning memoirist—tells the story of losing her infant son to Tay-Sachs disease, giving birth to her healthy daughter, and learning to accept her body—and how along her path in life, Frida inspired her to find a way forward when all else seemed lost. Frida is the subject of Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg (Notting Hill Editions, 2021), Rapp Black’s fourth and most recent book. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside, where she also teaches medical narratives in the School of Medicine.