What You Become in Flight

This book is absolutely gorgeous—a dance in itself. It’s fierce, poetic, self-reflective and a story not just for dancers, but for anyone who has a body, and a complex relationship with it. I love this book, and highly recommend it.

Women are often identified by their bodies - but it's when our bodies betray us that we find out we are so much more. Who we are is a dimension somewhere between our body and our expectation; our body and our desire; our body and what we know we are capable of despite its failings. Ellen O'Connell Whitett manages to share a universal story of how young women transform from solely identifying with the corporeal to women who understand that our bodies are taken from us, time and again, and yet we find the strength to hold onto ourselves. We find a way through grief and defeat, and more grief and more defeat - and when we thought our body could not possibly, ever again bring us joy - it does.<br /><br />I am not a dancer, but I do understand what it's like to push myself too hard and tie my body's ability with my worth. O'Connell Whittet provides a roadmap for women who are in rediscovery. Her poetic prose and her storytelling is so relatable. Her story's unfolding felt like a warm embrace. I felt seen by her and I know others will too.

Beginning with a girls' ballet class, the author shares her vulnerability by discussing dance injuries, anorexia, snake phobia, and deaths by terminal illness and violence. It is a story of how she made her way through her own mental traps and learned to support her own physical health.<br /><br />Early on, “I learned through my injury," the author tells us, "that making art requires more of me than I was prepared to consent to." She gradually left ballet and became a writer. Writing, she learned, is a way “to inscribe my life with permanence when I know my body is as fleeting as dancing.” She also found a way to eat, after which "the mental space" she had once "devote[d] to counting calories" could be redirected into writing this book.<br /><br />The ballet beginning shapes an uncommon frame to some thought processes that are more universal experiences. The memoir bears lessons for us about how we can all learn to accept ourselves more graciously.

This started out as a 5 star read. Ballet, the body in pain, social images of the body, and literature? Perfect book for me. But then in the middle, writing about the idea of pain became, well, painfully repetitive, forgetting the idea that less is more. And then we get to New Hampshire where things get muddled in her vulnerability, as if using it to (again) drive home the point of standing up again (but wait, didn't we resolve that earlier, how strong and resilient you are, because that's what ballet taught you?). I know it's not completely linear, just as healing is not. I loved this point but I got annoyed at the circuitous way it was presented, and how instead of being inspirational, became tiring instead. This needed a stronger and better editor. It also rubbed me the wrong way when she kept referring to herself as a writer (to counterbalance her being a dancer and to tell the world she's more than that when she stopped dancing), as well as the strangeness of stressing that they weren't rich enough but she was able to attend the best ballet schools, go to France, graduate school, (I only read about her career in the end), etc. Even Sylvia Plath was obsessed about getting published for the money, and finding teaching positions and scholarships. I'm sure there's a story behind all that but it wasn't mentioned so that was a huge gap and contradiction for me. All in all, this felt like a creative writing exercise, producing patches of work that were all forced into a publishable novel. It should have ended in ballet. The whole snake phobia, the PTSD felt forced and completely out of place.

Gorgeous. A memoir about ballet, writing, and most of all how we can only fly once we’ve faced our fears wholeheartedly, bodily.

A beautiful memoir.

OK, so here is another book that I thought would be one thing and it turned out to be another. I loved this book and the author so much I've started following her on Instagram (best wedding dress ever). Yes, a lot of the book revolved around her life in the world of dance, specifically ballet, but the family backstory and her journey to where she is today made for fascinating reading. <br /><br />As someone who took up ballet at age 20, like Zelda Fitzgerald and Lucia Joyce who she mentions, I could relate to a lot of the issues that occur in the ballet world. I don't want to write any spoilers but I was happy as to the path she ended up taking and is on in her life.<br /><br />Maybe it was the Portsmouth, NH and Boston Ballet connection that resonated with me, but in any case I couldn't put the book down.

If you like ballet you will love this book. If you don’t like ballet you will love this book. In What You Become In Flight, author Ellen O’Connell Whittet frames her early and formative experiences of love and becoming within the rigid structure provided by classical ballet. She literally breaks out of these bonds with a life-altering injury. This memoir is full of brave beauty and raw truths. Most striking is O’Connell Whittet’s ability to write about her most personal intimate moments in a way that envelopes the reader so that you feel as if these are your moments too and are moved by them the way only a classical ballet dancer knows how to move. It is a gift that O’Connell Whittet has translated the movement of ballet into the written word and shared it with us. I could not put this book down and am eagerly awaiting the next brilliant thing to come from this author.

What stuck me most obviously about this book is the skill and power of the dance scenes. Dance seldom translates well onto the page. Whittet composes dance scenes that made me feel both like I was watching in slow motion every precise movement and also like I was on the stage, feeling the movement as she brings her embodiment as a dancer to life. <br /><br />The book is tied together with unique insights about bodies, their power, pain, and healing. Whittet composes these insights in graceful sentences that left me savoring and reflecting on each one. <br /><br />Some quotes: <br />"Before all the things dancing brought to me--the control and sprains, the hunger and feeling of flight, it brought me that small flame that ignited the person I believed I was born to be."<br /><br />"Once I started eating, I realized all the things I had been hungry for all along." <br /><br />"I grew up on stage, in front of mirrors, learning by body was not my own, but the teacher's, the audience's, my partner's. Rather than fight my body, or transcend it, I learned the ways we control our bodies, and the ways we never can."<br /><br />"Hour by hour, in that first class back, I looked at myself int he mirror on the studio wall and thought: what a miracle. My muscles shivered with memory. I pieced myself back together, bone by bone.

I got this from my local bookstore, and I had really high hopes about it because of the description. But, I didn't think it delivered. There's something about the prose that takes itself WAY too seriously... like, the writer spent too long in writing school. So many of the sentences are labored and the writing tries to hard to sound "like a writer." I appreciated the parts about dance, at times, but once we got into her relationship with her husband I wanted to DNF this, but I also don't think it's fair to review something you haven't finished plus I kept hoping for a strong ending. The snake thing wasn't written in a way that made sense to me. Anyway, I don't really recommend this one because it's just trying too hard to be deep. I prefer other memoirs with honest voices.