Avra Wing had only seconds to react when an out-of-control car jumped the curb in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood. Her 3-year-old son, Eli, was walking beside her. Wing shielded him from the oncoming vehicle, saving his life, but sustained catastrophic injuries that ultimately required the amputation of her right leg above the knee.
In a new memoir, Stride: How I Walked Away from Trauma Toward Healing, Wing recounts that terrifying moment and the years that followed, exploring the psychological aftermath of amputation, the complexities of identity, and her long journey toward self-acceptance.
At the time of the accident, Wing was an emerging novelist whose debut, Angie, had been adapted into a feature film starring Geena Davis and James Gandolfini. Following weeks at Bellevue Hospital, she spent months at Rusk Institute relearning how to walk. Yet the physical challenges were only part of what lay ahead.
“Right after my accident,” Wing writes, “I was not thinking about what it meant to be disabled. I was focused on being disfigured.”
That distinction becomes central to her memoir. Wing describes struggling not only with her altered appearance but also with feelings about her own worth that had taken root long before the accident.
Her account avoids the familiar narrative in which physical rehabilitation leads neatly to emotional resolution. Instead, Wing explores the less predictable process of learning to inhabit a body she initially struggled to accept.
Family plays an important role throughout the book. Wing credits her husband, their two young sons, and the community she found at Rusk Institute with helping sustain her during recovery. She also reflects on her grandmother, who became blind from glaucoma but maintained an independent life after emigrating from Belarus.
As a child, Wing never regarded her grandmother’s blindness as defining her abilities. That memory takes on new meaning as Wing examines her own assumptions about disability.
The memoir also follows her experiences raising her children, her family’s later decision to adopt a daughter from China, and the ways creativity and connection helped shape her evolving understanding of herself.
Since 2009, Wing has led writing workshops for people with disabilities at the Center for Independence of the Disabled in New York City. The workshops provide opportunities for creative expression, something Wing considers an important part of healing.
Movement, too, eventually became a source of possibility. Through Zumba classes offered by NYU Langone Health’s Initiative for Women with Disabilities, Wing began experiencing her body in ways that extended beyond the limitations she had once associated with it.
In a Foreword Reviews review, Michele Sharpe praises Wing’s examination of the accident and its psychological consequences, noting how her prose explores months of denial without sentimentality.
Rather than presenting recovery as a destination, Stride considers how a person’s relationship with disability can continue to change over time.
Published September 22 by Girl Friday Productions, the 224-page memoir is available for $18.95.
