Culture Bite: Fierce and Delicate

There are surprisingly few memoirs from ballet dancers. We often get them from famed principal dancers, who are celebrities outside of the ballet world, but not many others. And it is a shame. People have very specific ideas about dancers, but they are often fantastical. Fierce and Delicate is realistic and heartbreaking, but also inspiring. If you are looking to read more on a dancer’s life, and what they experience, read on! Thank you to NetGalley for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Fierce and Delicate, Reneé K. Nicholson

Renée Nicholson’s professional training in ballet had both moments of magnificence and moments of torment, from fittings of elaborate platter tutus to strange language barriers and unrealistic expectations of the body. In Fierce and Delicate, she looks back on the often confused and driven self she had been shaped into—always away from home, with friends who were also rivals, influenced by teachers in ways sometimes productive and at other times bordering on sadistic—and finds beauty in the small roles she performed. When, inevitably, Nicholson moved on from dancing, severed from her first love by illness, she discovered that she retained the lyricism and narrative of ballet itself as she negotiated life with rheumatoid arthritis.

An intentionally fractured memoir-in-essays, Fierce and Delicate navigates the traditional geographies of South Florida, northern Michigan, New York City, Milwaukee, West Virginia, and also geographies of the body—long, supple limbs; knee replacements; remembered bodies and actual. It is a book about the world of professional dance and also about living with chronic disease, about being shattered yet realizing the power to assemble oneself again, in a new way.

Why You Should Read This…

I was shocked when I read the other Goodreads reviews for this book. Many focus on the negative aspects, but that is simply Nicholson’s reality. (It’s also spelled out in the blurb…) This was a touching, heart wrenching, and thoughtful memoir of a difficult relationship with ballet. It is a memoir, it’s not a study or scientific paper. It is a brutally honest set of memories of an artform that often decimates its artists.
Nicholson doesn’t hide her challenges and setbacks, she doesn’t make ballet appear as an angelic and easy path to take, as so many do. (We often see the “I just worked really really hard and it happened” narrative.) She also celebrates what she has learned and gained from ballet, and the positives that we can all take away from it.

I could not put this book down, and whether you are a dancer or someone interested in ballet, this is book you need to read.

And if you are looking for more history of ballet books, you can find my favourites here!

If you haven’t already, Fierce and Delicate should be added to your to-read list! 

Cheers,
The Historian
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