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.
An enlightening, perceptive and, ultimately, sad book. Ms. Robb evokes the romance of ballet while revealing its dark side and asks tough questions that have no clear answers.
Compelling ... Don’t Think, Dear is less a memoir than it is a feminist interrogation of the world of ballet as the author experienced it ... Lovers of classical ballet who don’t want to see the sausage being made might do well to avoid But I found myself feeling something like gratitude.
Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, the book weaves her early experiences as a dancer with those of her contemporaries, and of famous ballerinas ... Don’t Think Dear is powered by a fundamental love of the art form while exposing the toxic culture that runs through it. Robb may look fondly back at her ballet years but she can’t deny the intrinsic weirdness of 21st-century women willingly submitting themselves to a life of physical and psychological torment, conceived of and often enforced by men, for a picture-book fantasy of femininity.
