DANCING ON MY OWN TWO FEET

In this memoir, Todling writes of how an unhappy marriage made her neglect her love for dance, until she decided to make a change.

As a child, the author loved to dance, choreographing intricate routines with friends and performing them for family. When her mother brought her to a club to perform on her 13th birthday, she says, she realized that she wanted to dance for the rest of her life. However, at the age 20, she impulsively agreed to marry a man she didn’t love, and her ambitions for a successful career fell to the wayside, in part because he discouraged her from pursuing it. Todling writes with startling honesty about the dissolution of her marriage, a decade-long unraveling catalyzed by her husband’s battle with apparent allergies and an anxiety disorder; after initial attempts to get a diagnosis failed, he stopped seeing any doctors, she says. Instead, he insisted that she never leave the house while he was awake. The constant demands on the author intensified until she was scarcely able to leave the house, and she stopped dancing entirely. She distanced herself from friends and delayed promotions at work, while her spouse constantly scolded her and exhibited controlling behavior; it later emerged, she says, that he was fully capable of taking care of himself. In a pivotal scene, Todling decides to travel to Europe with her sister against her husband’s wishes. There, she felt the tether to her troubled marriage loosen and realized that she needed to transform her life. In the years that followed, her career took off, allowing her to visit dozens of countries for dance classes. Over the course of this memoir, in scenes recalled with vivid, painful detail, Todling describes her sadness, as when she felt forced to give up plans for her 30th birthday party with family and friends (“Shortly before midnight, I decided to cancel….As I sent the texts, I felt the tears well up, my body filled with regret and shame”). Later, she effectively relates her discovery of true romance, which she’d never experienced before.

A sometimes-harrowing but ultimately inspiring remembrance of recovery and creative self-expression.