An excerpt from Riva Lehrer's Golem Girl: A Memoir

The following piece, entitled "Showing Up," is by Lauren Berlant, literary scholar and cultural theorist, who is the George M. Pullman Professor of English at the University of Chicago.

Riva and I had talked for years about her desire to include a portrait of me in her "Risk" series, which I understood to be of people whom she finds a little overwhelming. I liked how she collaborated with her subjects but I wasn't sure what I would want from being a fixed body. I'm a writer, not a figure; a voice, not an icon; most alive in the conceptual space my fingers produce beyond the body, not an object that makes objects.

But in 2017 when again we spoke of it, I had just had a hysterectomy that showed significant tumor involvement. I thought if I were ever to do the portrait it should be then, to document either a bad summer I had or the opening scene of my death. Riva had thought she could draw me holding her mother's dictionary but I rejected that: I never wanted to be anyone's mother and, you know, English teacher=dictionary is depressing. I wanted to document the scar. Riva uses color brilliantly in the portrait to mark the two places of intense activity I walk around with now—my eyes and my body below the neck, each sites of making I pay attention to. The sittings were fun and open. I was learning to be a disabled person and Riva was writing her autobiography. I was learning to let my death in and she was learning to let her life in. Both of us needed skills in avoiding the genre lure of dramas, panics, and all the other pressing premature closures. I called the portrait "Showing Up," because that's what I like doing, because I'm constantly learning how to do it, and because that's what Riva and I did for each other.