Adapted from Sitting Pretty: The View From My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body by Rebekah Taussig with permission from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright 2020.

Rebekah Taussig’s engaging, thoughtful book, “Sitting Pretty,” is about growing up a paralyzed girl in the ’90s and early ’00s. Taussig is funny and smart and just sarcastic enough to be interesting and delightfully feminist and charmingly academic — and so is her book. In this excerpt, Taussig explores what it means to be lovable. And more importantly, what it means to love. Published by Harper Collins, “Sitting Pretty” is available from all the usual places. Learn more about Taussig at her site, rebekahtaussig.com.

An Ordinary Unimaginable Love Story

Sam Wagner was my one chance — at a love story, at being loved, at living the life of a wife. We went to church with the Wagners, and when Sam and I were 8 years old, he spent all of his allowance money to buy me a $3.95 Magic Eye book I’d picked out of my school’s Scholastic catalogue. His generous gift set off a tiny spark that maybe, if I wished it into the universe with all of my whole earnest heart, Sam would love me enough to marry me one day.

I still don’t know what did the trick but slowly, slowly, as the years stretched out and we turned into adolescents, Sam really did start to pay attention to me. He’d sit near me on the bus during youth group trips, and we’d sing along l