Events

Colfax Avenue: Acclaimed writer Emily Rapp, who was herself born with a congenital defect that lead to the amputation of her left foot at age four. By the time she was eight, she’d had dozens of operations and her entire leg below the knee had been amputated. She had also become the smiling, always perky, indefatigable poster child for the March of Dimes, all of which she recounted in her previous book Poster Child: A Memoir. Now she is our guest with a new book The Still Point of the Turning World: A Mother’s Story (Penguin), the memoir of her son being diagnosed at nine months old with Tay-Sachs disease, a rare and always-fatal degenerative disorder. Rapp is a former Fulbright scholar, educated at Harvard University, Saint Olaf College, Trinity College-Dublin, and the University of Texas at Austin, where she was a James A. Michener Fellow. She has received many awards and was recently named one of the “Faces to Watch in 2013” by Los Angeles Times. “The Still Point of the Turning World is about the smallest things and the biggest things, the ugliest things and the most beautiful things, the darkest things and the brightest things, but most of all it’s about one very important thing: the way a woman loves a boy who will soon die. Emily Rapp didn’t want to tell us this story. She had to. That necessity is evident in every word of this intelligent, ferocious, grace-filled, gritty, astonishing starlight of a book.” —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild Can’t make it to the signing? Request an autographed copy here: books@tatteredcover.com Emily Rapp’s website