In My Own Words: Alison Lapper review – a hammer blow to your heart

At points, the formidable artist’s story makes you flinch at the toxicity she’s faced. Her incredibly frank account of being rejected by her mother and losing her son is almost beyond comprehension

The latest edition of the BBC documentary strand In My Own Words presents Alison Lapper’s story. As you might expect from this formidable woman, born without arms and with shortened legs, and abandoned by her mother to a children’s home, she tells it unsentimentally and unsparingly. Almost every word is like a hammer blow to your heart. She tells us that art is about expressing and evoking emotion, but even when we see her new exhibition going up, full of works about her son Parys, who died five years ago at 19, a true understanding of how she has borne all that she has, how she has found the strength to keep going remains elusive. Perhaps it must; perhaps it should. But she is extraordinary.

We begin with the event that brought her to public consciousness – when the sculpture Alison Lapper Pregnant by Marc Quinn was erected on the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. We watch with her footage of reactions from passersby. “What dumbo decided to put it here?” says one. “It’s not what Nelson would have wanted to look at,” says another, which is almost a laughter line. Another wonders if it’s good for people to look at “deformities.” This was less than 20 years ago.

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