A Certain Loneliness

A Memoir

Sandra Gail Lambert

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781496207197
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496208620
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

After contracting polio as a child, Sandra Gail Lambert progressed from braces and crutches to a manual wheelchair to a power wheelchair—but loneliness has remained a constant, from the wild claustrophobia of a child in body casts to just yesterday, trapped at home, gasping from pain. A Certain Loneliness is a meditative and engaging memoir-in-essays that explores the intersection of disability, queerness, and female desire with frankness and humor. Lambert presents the adventures of flourishing within a world of uncertain tomorrows: kayaking alone through swamps withalligators; negotiating planes, trains, and ski lifts; scoring free drugs from dangerous men; getting trapped in a too-deep snow drift without crutches. A Certain Loneliness is literature of the body, palpable and present, in which Lambert's lifelong struggle with isolation and independence—complete with tiresome frustrations, slapstick moments, and grand triumphs—are wound up in the long history of humanity's relationship to the natural world.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Solace
• The Laundromat
• Figuring It Out
• Well-Nourished White Child
• Atlanta—1968
• Sex Objects
• Complex Math
• Atlanta—1984
• Becoming Lazy
• Rolling in the Mud
• Open-Water Swimmers
• Pass the Hemlock
• Poster Children
• The Art of Budgeting
• Mosquitoes
• Negotiating a Life
• Dehiscence
• May or May Not
• Atlanta—2007
• The Last Period
• Immoderation and Excess
• Looking for the V
• Yielding
• I Am Here, in This Morning Light
• Pride Goeth
• Horror in the Okefenokee
• I’m Fine, Thank You
• The Blind Girl and the Cripple Get on a Plane
• The Swimmer
• Source Acknowledgments
• About Sandra Gail Lambert
• Series List