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Reviews tagging 'Eating disorder'
Don't Think, Dear: On Loving and Leaving Ballet by Alice Robb
16 reviews
lizzy52's review against another edition
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
Content Warnings
Moderate: Eating disorder
aqtbenz's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Body shaming, Excrement, Injury/Injury detail, Medical trauma, Blood, Eating disorder, Medical content, and Emotional abuse
jiscoo's review
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
5.0
My best friend in high school was a classically trained ballerina who danced for hours every day. I was a classical musician with a masochistic streak—something my teachers lauded as unusual work ethic and which got me accolade after accolade in my small public school orchestra world. During our sophomore year, our shared intensity lit a fuse between us and we became inseparable: we were the pair of perfectionists in every class working past the bell, the ones who took every casual competition a little too far, the friends who were obsessed with each other because obsession was our entire modus operandi. The year I sat next to her in math class, I had the best posture of my life, just by passively mirroring her. Friends started calling us by a portmanteau of our names. We shared headphones in the cafeteria to listen to The Nutcracker the year she danced it and I played it—for separate productions. We considered ourselves spiritual soulmates because we understood the darkest things about the other before she even disclosed it: the consuming spirals of self-doubt, heinous amounts of jealousy toward other girls, routines of physical and psychological self-harm. We encouraged each other, kept the other alive, but also served as one another’s blinders, reflecting and reinforcing each other’s monomania and together retreating into that world of our own where every emotion was a little bit sharper and every pain a little sweeter.
Neither of us went professional in our respective performing art. But even as we ostensibly studied something else—academic—in college, we both threw ourselves into rehearsal after extracurricular rehearsal. We found ourselves in the studio or practice room until closing time day after day during the four borrowed years that our liberal arts degrees allowed us to nurse the performing dream, even if it had already, by then, passed unseen into the realm of fantasy. We are now one year out of college. She still dances, in open classes; I still play, keeping on top of my repertoire from college. But when we talk about it, it is still through a layer of unspoken what-ifs, of the grand dreams we carried for so long our anatomies (both physical and metaphorical) have grown around it, irreversibly.
Alice Robb's exploration of the modern history of American ballet and her reflection on her own experiences as a SAB trainee and former pre-professional dancer was eye-opening and resonant. I also learned so much about the history of ballet, about the parts of my best friend's world I hadn't been privy to, about the sources of her habits and tendencies that had been mystifying or even annoying to me. Though the path to becoming a professional ballerina is far more cutthroat than that to a professional career as a classical musician and the lottery considerably more bottlenecked, I felt stripped bare and pierced through my Robb's descriptions of the self-destructive rituals of dancers and the lasting effects of an adolescence spent at the barre. Robb is a wonderful storyteller who pulls no punches in this book, which is well-researched and admirably honest. Through case studies, mythologies, and reflections, Robb deconstructs the world she loved and left, giving us a glimpse of the beauty and the bloodshed (which are one and the same). What stays with me now is that the “world of our own” that my friend and I had found is in fact populated by a legion of dancers and other performers, and that for better or for worse, we all have permanent residency there.
Neither of us went professional in our respective performing art. But even as we ostensibly studied something else—academic—in college, we both threw ourselves into rehearsal after extracurricular rehearsal. We found ourselves in the studio or practice room until closing time day after day during the four borrowed years that our liberal arts degrees allowed us to nurse the performing dream, even if it had already, by then, passed unseen into the realm of fantasy. We are now one year out of college. She still dances, in open classes; I still play, keeping on top of my repertoire from college. But when we talk about it, it is still through a layer of unspoken what-ifs, of the grand dreams we carried for so long our anatomies (both physical and metaphorical) have grown around it, irreversibly.
Alice Robb's exploration of the modern history of American ballet and her reflection on her own experiences as a SAB trainee and former pre-professional dancer was eye-opening and resonant. I also learned so much about the history of ballet, about the parts of my best friend's world I hadn't been privy to, about the sources of her habits and tendencies that had been mystifying or even annoying to me. Though the path to becoming a professional ballerina is far more cutthroat than that to a professional career as a classical musician and the lottery considerably more bottlenecked, I felt stripped bare and pierced through my Robb's descriptions of the self-destructive rituals of dancers and the lasting effects of an adolescence spent at the barre. Robb is a wonderful storyteller who pulls no punches in this book, which is well-researched and admirably honest. Through case studies, mythologies, and reflections, Robb deconstructs the world she loved and left, giving us a glimpse of the beauty and the bloodshed (which are one and the same). What stays with me now is that the “world of our own” that my friend and I had found is in fact populated by a legion of dancers and other performers, and that for better or for worse, we all have permanent residency there.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Eating disorder, Body shaming, Injury/Injury detail, Fatphobia, and Adult/minor relationship
chara71613's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
4.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Eating disorder
alexjmartin's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
3.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Eating disorder
allthebestjess's review against another edition
emotional
informative
slow-paced
3.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Eating disorder and Fatphobia
Moderate: Adult/minor relationship
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