Turning Pointe is out in three days. Three short days, and it will be on shelves, in mailboxes, and in the hands of the people for whom I wrote it. Many people have asked me this week how I’m feeling, and all I can say is “a lot.” I’m feeling a lot.
Reviews are starting to come out, and they’re very positive. Publisher’s Weekly calls it “a captivating debut,” Ms. Magazine calls it “groundbreaking,” and the Boston Globe calls it “incisive and unsparing.” The response to this excerpt in Marie Claire, from the chapter about ballet’s overwhelming whiteness, has been positive from most people, and straight up hateful from white supremacists, which seems like a good sign.
Advance copies are already out there in the wild, and people are photographing the book with their tutus and pointe shoes and, just as delightfully, with their puppies.
So, I’m feeling a lot. I’m nervous, I’m excited, I’m still in a small measure of denial that this book will ever belong to anyone but me. And I’m also deeply, profoundly grateful for everyone who supported me as I researched and wrote it. That includes you, dear readers. I’m grateful that you came along for this ride and kept me company on this long and otherwise rather solitary journey. I hope the book is worth your wait.
One thing I found as I wrote this book was almost everyone I told about it had some story to tell about ballet. They wanted to do it but their parents couldn’t afford it, they did it but they were told they were too fat for it, they wanted to do it but their parents were afraid it would “make them gay.” There are so many people out there with a ballet story, and a lot of those stories are stories of rejection and mistreatment and burnout and heartbreak. There’s so much ballet trauma out there that I didn’t expect to find. And a lot of people are telling themselves a version of those stories that say, “I failed at ballet.” When the truth is that ballet failed them. I wrote this book for them, because like me, a lot of them still love ballet, and they want to make ballet worthy of that love. Whatever your ballet story is, I wrote this book for you.
If you haven’t pre-ordered it yet, there’s still time to do that wherever you buy books. And you can find a full list of public events, including a virtual launch event at The Strand on the night of May 4, here. I hope you can make it.
That’s all for this week. See you in a few days, when the wait will finally, finally, be over. Now Alexa, please play some soothing whale sounds.
Chloe.