Dancing Through It

 
      I certainly seem to be on a roll with memoirs. This memoir, Dancing Through It by Jenifer Ringer was right up my alley. It is about life as a professional dancer, life as a Christian gaining and losing and regaining her faith and touches on Ringer's struggles with eating disorders as well. I've always been fascinated with dancers, I was a gymnast and found that they were both so similar and so different than myself. Ringer was just 16 years old when she became a professional dancer in New York, and worked her way up the ranks to principal dancer; but she had a emotional and physical roller coaster on her journey there. Ringer even found herself cut from the company at one point when her eating disorder was out of control, and it took the man she would eventually marry and finding Christ again to obtain control over her eating disorder and return to life as a professional dancer. This memoir is filled with emotions ranging from euphoria to despair as Jenifer matures and becomes an adult. I really enjoyed the glimpse into the dance world that Ringer offered, and was done with this book in under a day.
      Fleeting at times, the memoir does skip around some to seemingly unconnected events of Ringer's life. She goes from talking about her favorite dances in exquisite detail to talking about finding Christ which enabled her to recover from two opposite eating disorders. Once I accepted that this was Ringer's voice though, I enjoyed following around her thoughts on paper - it is her story, and this was how she knew best to share it.
      At the end of the memoir, we find Ringer happily married, with two children and still a professional dancer at the age of 40. I certainly didn't know there were professional dancers at the age of 40 - my gymnastics career was half of hers!
     All in all, I really enjoyed this memoir, and found myself pretending to be a ballerina in my room late at night. This memoir covers the good and the bad of the dancing world, and is rich in its writing.