An Evening with Caren Rabbino in conversation with Dr. Judith McCleary
About this Event
🎟 This event is FREE and open to the public and books will be available for purchase the night of the event! An RSVP grants general entry, but seating is not guaranteed, so please try and show up early. Can't make the event?
“Caren Rabbino’s Asymmetries does everything memoir should do: it disrupts and delights. Rabbino artfully explores the unique conundrum of life in a non-normative body, using her experiences to challenge limited ideas about how this looks and feels. She also articulates the struggle we all face as embodied humans, disabled and temporarily able-bodied, to truly belong—to ourselves and to the world.”—Emily Rapp Black, author of Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg
About The Book
At fourteen, Caren Rabbino loses her leg to childhood cancer. The surgery saves her life—but it also fractures her relationship to her body, her family, and the world that suddenly reads as “other.”
In the years that follow, she navigates phantom limb pain and relentless pressure to “fix” herself, even as she tries to pass as normal to protect status, safety, and social mobility. She searches for belonging through work, art, and travel, while grappling with sexuality, objectification, and the particular loneliness of being visibly different.
Only after years of avoidance does she step into community—teaching yoga to an amputee group and discovering a grounded, hard-won form of embodied knowledge that cuts through shame and self-protection. Asymmetries is a candid story of survival and self-definition, asking what it means to inhabit a changed body—and to be seen, on purpose.
About The Author
In addition to her writing life, Caren Rabbino is the Principal of Fast Forward Consulting, a firm that supports organizational development for clients in the arts, architecture and design, marketing and communications, education, and non-profit sectors. In 1989, Caren co-founded Miami Light Project and served as Executive Director of this non-profit cultural organization, producing an annual music, dance, and theater series. Now in its 37th season, MLP continues to provide workshops for artists, educational programs for students of all ages, and commissioning opportunities for performers.
About The Moderator
Dr. McCleary is a clinical psychologist who has practiced in South Florida for over 30 years. Early in her career, she focused on health psychology and worked in the neurology department at UM's School of Medicine, treating people with chronic pain and Parkinson's disease. Later, Dr. McCleary consulted with the school's OBGYN department on developing its IVF program. Dr. McCleary has a private practice in Miami.
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