Alice Robb, DON'T THINK, DEAR: On Love and Leaving Ballet
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[1:03]Alice Rob is the author of Don't Think Dear, Unloving and Leaving Ballet.
[1:08]Alice is written for Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The New Republic
[1:12]among other publications.
[1:14]Her first book, Why We Dream, was recommended by places like The New Yorker, The New York
[1:18]Times, Today, Vogue, Time, and The Guardian, and has been translated into 17 foreign languages.
[1:24]Welcome, Alice.
[1:25]Thank you so much for coming on mom's Don't Have Time to read books.
[1:30]I'm so excited to have you.
[1:32]Okay.
[1:33]Can you please tell listeners about your beautiful memoir?
[1:36]Yeah.
[1:37]So my book is called Don't Think Dear, Unloving and Leaving Ballet.
[1:41]And it is in part a memoir about my time as a student at the School of American Ballet.
[1:47]It's also about four of my classmates who I started with at SAB when we were all nine years old
[1:53]and our lives all went in different directions.
[1:55]And it's also a feminist interrogation of the ballet world in ballet culture.
[2:01]I love that you admit right away that you're like stalking all these people on Instagram.
[2:05]It's like, you're like, but then I feel like it's okay because I have a picture of
[2:10]us all together since I'm really stalking because I know them.
[2:13]I like just your whole like interior monologue and rationalization that was very relatable.
[2:17]I mean, that was the seed of this book.
[2:20]One of the seeds was so no media talking.
[2:22]I mean, I talked about it on the book, but there were years when I was running away from ballet trying to
[2:28]think about it.
[2:29]It was all sort of too painful.
[2:30]But one thing I could not stop doing was stalking my old classmates on Instagram.
[2:34]This book was really just a big extension of that.
[2:38]Oh, I love it.
[2:39]Well, you start out by showing us how much like grit and determination you have that you don't give up applying for the School of American Ballet.
[2:47]And you said forever like being associated with rain and the whole city was like on its knees because of 9-11 and that was right when you got your your lifelong dream came true.
[2:59]And so yeah, I mean, I think I was definitely more whatever little bits of early success I had were more about hard work than about talent.
[3:10]I just kept really wanted to be a dancer and just kept kept applying for the School.
[3:16]And I think maybe doing some of the signs that this was not going to be the easiest path for me, but still.
[3:22]I mean, I might want to be a ballet dancer.
[3:24]There is no, no matter how hard I worked.
[3:27]I'm not going to be a ballet dancer.
[3:29]I feel like you had a certainly not at the level that you were doing it.
[3:34]So I feel like you're underplaying your talent.
[3:36]It might not be like, I mean, it's kind of like what are the things that look about is that so I mean, most of us are not going to be ballet answers,
[3:44]so many little girls pass through a phase of wanting to be a dancer.
[3:47]I mean, almost in the same way the girls want to be like Cinderella or a very princess.
[3:52]And there's just so many, you started such a young age before you really know how you're going to develop.
[3:57]So there's so many girls who are devoting a huge amount of their childhood.
[4:01]I mean, for me, it was hours and hours every week plus summer intensives and, you know, stretching at home while I watch TV and just kind of so so much commitment.
[4:11]And the reality is for the vast majority of even teenagers who've made it pretty far.
[4:16]It's not going to be there for a year.
[4:17]True.
[4:18]Yeah.
[4:19]Well, most things, I mean, honestly, most things we do is kids are not going to be our lifelong careers.
[4:24]Like there are very few things that start that early and just like keep going.
[4:28]Yeah.
[4:29]Well, I've heard from people who, you know, pursued acting or different sports, even some like former aspiring academics.
[4:39]And then anyone was a kind of, you know, difficult dream.
[4:44]Yeah.
[4:45]Yeah.
[4:46]You also wrote a lot about the effect of dance on body image and your body and even what it was like, you know, not being in control of your bones, which was such an interesting way to say that.
[4:58]You're like, I could be a control of my food and my body, not my bones.
[5:02]I was like, well, never thought about my bones like that before.
[5:06]Totally healthy.
[5:07]Yeah.
[5:08]I mean, the standards of ballet are just so incredibly specific.
[5:12]I mean, people think of what's the ballet dancer, you know, I don't know what's supposed to look like.
[5:17]They think, oh, they're skinny.
[5:19]But it's just so much more than that.
[5:21]We had to think about, you know, the ratio of our torso to our legs of, you know, the width of our hit bones, the length of the neck.
[5:31]I mean, I had one friend who was told that her shins were too long.
[5:36]And I mean, there's just, you know, someone else told that her neck was too short.
[5:39]They're just, these are things that you just, they're just, they're just very little.
[5:42]You can do about them.
[5:44]But of course, you know, we would try to compensate, you know, like maybe your neck would look longer.
[5:49]You were stupid.
[5:50]Anything like that.
[5:51]So it's a little.
[5:52]Yeah.
[5:53]Yeah.
[5:54]Well, you also explain that part of it had to do with, you know, the,
[5:59]the patriarchy, if you will, or like the masculine, the, the men.
[6:03]I mean, I don't know how to say it like that.
[6:05]It also has to do with the men who are involved and from balancing to Peter Martin's and all of the, the detrimental effects that having the sort of abuse of men at the helm.
[6:15]Like of this coterie of women.
[6:16]What, what that could do.
[6:18]Yeah.
[6:19]I mean, ballet is a world that isn't some way of very female.
[6:22]I mean, the vast majority of students, especially young students are girls.
[6:27]It was a very gendered world as well.
[6:29]I mean, you know, thinking specifically tiny bits of change.
[6:33]But my book is largely about ballet culture in the 2000s.
[6:37]But, you know, boys and girls are always in separate classes at FAB.
[6:41]Boys all got to attend for free.
[6:43]Where's girls had to pay.
[6:45]And then so boys were this like kind of treated as this special scarce resource.
[6:51]And then meanwhile at the top.
[6:53]I mean, the vast majority of choreographers were and still are men.
[6:57]Women are trained more to join the core to ballet, which is where the job is to look like everyone else.
[7:04]Like, you know, a dozen small and called doing the same thing.
[7:06]So it doesn't exactly lend itself to nurturing your creativity.
[7:10]And then yeah, I mean, there's a history of like dictatorial male directors who, you know, control every aspect of the dancers lives.
[7:20]Who, you know, marry their dancers were usually much younger.
[7:25]This was really from top to bottom.
[7:28]Tell me what it was like reconnecting with the girls from your class.
[7:34]I mean, it really became so this book went through so many different phases.
[7:38]As I was writing it, when I first started, when I first had the idea,
[7:42]I thought it was going to be much much less personal and much more like academic.
[7:46]Like I actually started.
[7:47]My first book was like much more straightforwardly journalism.
[7:50]And I thought this book was going to be like a group biography of, you know, four famous women dancers from history.
[7:57]Then I added in my own story.
[7:59]I was like, yeah, I kind of know this is fun.
[8:01]And then the final stage was I wanted to kind of expand it out for me and include my classmates.
[8:07]And I think that was really the thing that gave it the book for me.
[8:10]Like that was the most meaningful part for me.
[8:13]And it was incredibly validating because to hear my classmates stories because I kind of had this before I started working on the book.
[8:21]So just to, I mean, I quit ballet when I was 15, I'm 31 now.
[8:26]So I haven't done ballet in a really long time.
[8:29]And I kind of felt a little bit almost embarrassed that ballet still had such a hold on me and on my psyche.
[8:37]And you know, I would, I think I still, and I started the book.
[8:41]I did a little to a lesser extent now.
[8:43]Like if I ever went to the ballet, I would feel sort of jealous of the dancers.
[8:47]And I still kind of had internalize those, the ballet standards of, you know, what's the perfect body.
[8:54]And when I started talking to my classmates, some of them had also quit ballet at the same time as me.
[9:00]And I heard how much ballet was still impacting them.
[9:03]It really, that's what gave me the confidence that like this is a story worth telling.
[9:08]And I wasn't just like a weirdo for still thinking about ballet.
[9:14]No.
[9:15]I mean, it's such a formative piece of your let.
[9:19]I mean, how can you not think about it?
[9:21]Yeah.
[9:22]I don't know.
[9:23]I mean, I wouldn't beat yourself up.
[9:24]I wouldn't beat yourself up.
[9:25]No.
[9:26]Oh my gosh.
[9:29]Well, how did, how did they all feel about revisiting this?
[9:34]It's interesting.
[9:35]I also said I worked on the book over the course of a few years.
[9:37]So I was able to actually like see things change in people's lives.
[9:42]The kind of external realities and also how we were all thinking about things.
[9:47]I mean, I think we were all, you know, struggling with a lot of the same things.
[9:51]But I also think over the course.
[9:52]So it's kind of an interesting period that we were all, you know, talking about this like some sort of late 20s to early 30s.
[10:00]And I think as we became like firmer in our adult identities,
[10:04]some of the ballet sort of residue was falling away a bit.
[10:07]So another thing's, I mean, one of my friends
[10:10]who I write about Emily who actually is still a dancer.
[10:13]When I first connected with her three or four years ago,
[10:16]she was in a pretty dark place.
[10:18]She wasn't working.
[10:19]She had just had, she had a hip surgery
[10:22]that she hadn't really recovered from.
[10:24]You know, she was sort of living at home
[10:26]and not sure what she was gonna do.
[10:29]And she also felt sure that, you know,
[10:32]I mean, she was in her late 20s,
[10:33]like she felt like her best years were,
[10:36]as a dancer were past her.
[10:37]And then actually like when she was 30,
[10:40]she got an amazing job dancing at the Met Opera.
[10:43]So she's, you know, I think people have kind of landed
[10:47]and, you know, ended up being a bit more hopeful
[10:51]than I think I thought it might be when I started writing.
[10:55]That's good.
[10:57]What is your relationship with your body like these days?
[10:59]I think it's pretty good.
[11:02]I, yeah, I mean, I'll take a ballet class from time to time.
[11:06]There are like positive things that I feel like I took
[11:08]from ballet in regards to how I relate to my body.
[11:11]Like it still physically feels good to do the movements.
[11:16]But at the same time, the environment of a ballet class
[11:19]can be kind of triggering.
[11:20]So I'll only do that like once every month or two.
[11:23]But yeah, I mean, I found I like running and I'm on class best.
[11:27]So I love the other substitutes that are left all encompassing.
[11:31]But it is still the kind of thing where I'm like, you know,
[11:34]I don't know if you're familiar with Strava.
[11:36]There's app that tracks your runs.
[11:38]Like I have to, I still kind of steer clear of like things
[11:41]that will, that can make you really obsessive.
[11:44]Like I don't, I don't really don't have an Apple watch
[11:46]or like a Fitbit or anything.
[11:48]Got it.
[11:49]I feel the phone like records everything for me.
[11:52]When I run the rare times that I run anymore.
[11:55]But you know, so much, well, I didn't know that there was a
[11:58]staff count feature until someone told me about it.
[12:00]And then once I knew about it, I could not stop checking it.
[12:04]So well, I wish none of never told me about it.
[12:07]Oh, sorry.
[12:07]Well, good thing I didn't just wrote it now.
[12:09]No, I don't look at it for steps because that's too depressing.
[12:12]I barely like walked five feet a day.
[12:13]But I, you know, I like to feel some sort of accomplishment of
[12:16]like how far I ran, not like the steps.
[12:19]But oh, sometimes I'm like, oh my God, I must have read
[12:22]like four miles and it'll be like 2.2.
[12:25]Like what?
[12:27]So what do you do when you're not working on books like this
[12:31]and taking the occasional dance class?
[12:33]What's the crux of your life like?
[12:37]I mean, I've been pretty consuming, uh,
[12:40]only fully.
[12:41]I mean, I also do some journalism still.
[12:44]Um, that's where I started my writing career.
[12:48]So especially in these like little periods post book that's usually what I
[12:51]go back to.
[12:52]It's nice to have some little quick hit things, you know,
[12:56]get something up that's short term.
[12:58]But yeah, just kind of reading and writing and
[13:02]placing that.
[13:04]How did you, I mean, it sounds like the book given all of the iterations it
[13:08]went through, it would have been, I mean, was that stressful?
[13:11]Like, did you enjoy the process?
[13:12]Or how did you feel now like looking back on the whole writing piece of it?
[13:17]Yeah, I mean, another big part of the book was,
[13:20]there was still like a pretty heavy research component.
[13:24]So I went back and read, you know, a ton of like dancers, memoirs and
[13:30]books about the history of ballet and that was actually really fun
[13:34]because when I was doing ballet, we did very little of that.
[13:38]So it was interesting to like read a history, a sort of like short history
[13:43]of ballet and actually like be surprised by a lot of it.
[13:47]Like there were really, especially, I grew up in the
[13:49]SAB in New York's new ballet world.
[13:51]So I knew, I did know a lot about Balanjean,
[13:54]but I knew very little about like,
[13:57]dancers and choreographers anywhere else.
[14:00]I mean, I wrote most of this book during, during COVID lockdown.
[14:04]So honestly, it was a pretty, it was nice to feel like I had
[14:06]some like a project.
[14:09]It felt very optimistic to work on something that would like come out in the future.
[14:14]So that was nice.
[14:15]But yeah, I mean, I actually did, like, I'm a total nerd
[14:19]and I love doing research stuff, but it was fun to also do the like
[14:23]interpersonal stuff and like go, you know, I would like go over to our dinner
[14:28]with an old friend who I hadn't talked to since we were 15,
[14:31]but also record the dinner.
[14:33]And yeah, I mean, I think it was, and then there was also the personal
[14:37]stuff and it's like, I went back to my childhood bedroom and was like
[14:42]digging out my old diaries from under the bed and, you know, talking to my
[14:46]parents about their memories.
[14:48]It was, yeah, I mean, my, my first book was about the science of dreaming,
[14:52]and I would say that was, that was much harder.
[14:54]Like I had to actually go, you know, read books about
[15:00]biology and psychology and interview scientists and stuff.
[15:04]This was, yeah, this was pretty fun.
[15:08]What is your next project going to be?
[15:09]Well, I'm not sure.
[15:12]My, my two books have been very different from each other,
[15:15]that thing. And I think my third book will also be a different genre.
[15:21]Oh, okay. Yeah. Amazing.
[15:25]I was reading to my son last night and I was like, in the middle of it, I was like,
[15:29]I really want to write a book like this.
[15:31]And he's like, did the character just say that or are you saying that?
[15:34]And I was like, no, I'm saying that.
[15:35]Like, that's what I really like to do if I had unlimited time.
[15:38]I was like, just keep writing for my kids and their ages.
[15:41]You know, I always have something to read.
[15:44]But anyway, I don't know.
[15:45]I feel like, I don't know, as you try different genres.
[15:48]I'm like, that sounds interesting.
[15:50]You know, sort of like intellectually fun to give it a shot.
[15:53]I mean, it might be more like useful if I did a consistent thing
[15:57]that I could like take my readers from one book to the next.
[16:01]But TV whatever.
[16:03]Yeah, readers are pretty adaptable.
[16:05]I think he did it.
[16:07]Any advice to aspiring authors?
[16:09]I mean, I feel like I had a kind of weird path where I never studied.
[16:14]I didn't study English or writing.
[16:16]I studied archaeology and then I went into journalism.
[16:21]And when I saw my first book, like, I actually had never written anything longer than an article.
[16:26]This was a pretty big leap.
[16:27]But I think that the main way I've learned, I mean, other than,
[16:33]you know, I've been fortunate to have great editors.
[16:36]I have a community of writer friends.
[16:38]But really just reading, I think that's just, that's just the biggest thing.
[16:42]And reading the type of thing that you think you might want to make.
[16:45]I mean, one book that was like, sort of formative for me as I was starting to think about,
[16:50]oh, what would, what could a book about dance look like?
[16:53]Was, I don't know if you're familiar with the book The Lonely City by Olivia Lang.
[16:57]But it's a kind of like hybrid memoir research-based kind of criticism book where she,
[17:04]it's about, the memoir strand is about Olivia Lang moving from London to New York for a relationship
[17:10]that then ends and it's about, and about being lonely in a foreign city.
[17:14]And then she kind of uses that to, she goes to museums and looks at art that deals with loneliness.
[17:19]And then she kind of gets into these, like, biographies of artists and her, you know,
[17:24]like criticism of the art or interpretation of the art.
[17:28]It's a really beautiful book. But yeah, that was, I think there were a handful of books like that
[17:31]that kind of helped me think about, like, how to structure this.
[17:35]Yeah, so I guess reading.
[17:36]I think that's great advice.
[17:38]Alice, thank you so much. Thanks for coming on mom's no time to read books.
[17:42]I really think you're a great writer. I love the way you write and your whole style and,
[17:46]you know, it's sort of like mix of emotion and analysis. And it's like, I don't know, it was,
[17:52]it was great. I really love the way you write once. Thank you so much for having me out.
[17:56]Okay. Thank you. All right. Have a great day. Bye bye.
[18:01]Thanks for listening to this episode of mom's don't have time to read books.
[18:04]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zebi Owens and at mom's don't have time to read books.
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[18:23]fantastic intro and out trim music.