Reviews with content warning for Homophobia - Piruetas

I found this book to grow on me throughout my reading experience. I think it took my a little while to get used to the disparate narrative style and to fully empathize with a person very unlike me. In the end, I still feel like its message was incomplete. Reading the author’s note was illuminating, because it seems like Walden knows she wrote a book about figure skating that is also about everything else. She tells us we can make up our own meaning/interpretation. I’m not really sure that I got to meaning, but this memoir does an excellent job of locating you in her feelings. If you read books “for vibes”, this would be an excellent choice.

We follow Tillie through vignettes of private coaching, synchro team sessions, cello lessons, school bullying, a young queer romance and a gross, jarring sexual assault. In all of these events, you can feel her building isolation and as a reader, I felt like her life was incredibly claustrophobic. The whole time, I was waiting for an explosion, but, it seems like that wouldn’t have been authentic. Walden seems like she lived a lot of this time holding her breath (memoir reviews are just stranger psychoanalysis, sorry friends).

When I put this on my ‘to read’ list, I originally thought it was about ballet (I’m unobservant). But I was happy to find it about figure skating, because I am a bit (read: very) obsessed with the sport. I am not in the world of it, but even from a fan’s perspective it seems like it can be very toxic (understatement of the year). I am glad to see such an in-depth story about that aspect of it.

Also, the art in this is just fully engrossing, favorite spread was the one of her testing with her layout. I think I may be biased toward this because as someone who follows skating, I was happy to know what her marking signified, and am always thinking about how difficult it must be to remember so many specific movements.

Content Warnings