Don't Think, Dear by Alice Robb

Don't Think, Dear by Alice Robb

"Expertly choreographed and long overdue, this is the nuanced reckoning ballet needs, ballerinas deserve, and all feminists should note." -Oprah Daily

An incisive exploration of ballet's role in the modern world, told through the experience of the author and her classmates at the most elite ballet school in the country: the School of American Ballet.

Growing up, Alice Robb dreamed of becoming a ballet dancer. But by age fifteen, she had to face the reality that she would never meet the impossibly high standards of the hyper-competitive ballet world. After she quit, she tried to avoid ballet--only to realize, years later, that she was still haunted by the lessons she had absorbed in the mirror-lined studios of Lincoln Center, and that they had served her well in the wider world. The traits ballet takes to an extreme--stoicism, silence, submission--are valued in girls and women everywhere.

Profound, nuanced, and passionately researched, Don't Think, Dear is Robb's excavation of her adolescent years as a dancer and an exploration of how those days informed her life for years to come.

As she grapples with the pressure she faced as a student at the School of American Ballet, she investigates the fates of her former classmates as well. From sweet and innocent Emily, whose body was deemed thin enough only when she was too ill to eat, to precocious and talented Meiying, who was thrilled to be cast as the young star of the Nutcracker but dismayed to see Asians stereotyped onstage, and Lily, who won the carrot they had all been chasing--an apprenticeship with the New York City Ballet--only to spend her first season dancing eight shows a week on a broken foot.

Theirs are stories of heartbreak and resilience, of reinvention and regret. Along the way, Robb weaves in the myths of famous ballet personalities past and present, from the groundbreaking Misty Copeland, who rose from poverty to become an icon of American ballet, to the blind diva Alicia Alonso, who used the heat of the spotlights and the vibrations of the music to navigate space onstage. By examining the psyche of a dancer, Don't Think, Dear grapples with the contradictions and challenges of being a woman today.

Robb, Alice: - Alice Robb is a writer in Brooklyn. She writes a column for New York's Science of Us, and has contributed to Elle, the New Statesman, Foreign Policy, and The New Republic, where she was a staff writer. Before that, she studied archaeology and anthropology at Oxford.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780358653332
ISBN 10	0358653339
Title	Don't Think, Dear
Author	Alice Robb
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Mariner Books
Year published	2023-02-28
Number of pages	304
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.