Reading on a Sunday
Aug. 23rd, 2021 01:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
allekhaFinished reading: "Frozen Teardrop" by Lucinda Ruh, an autobiography of a figure skater who was very spinny. As I mentioned before, I had a lot of thoughts on it, so I'm going to cut them.
Reading this was a weird experience.
So, on some levels, it is not very good; it needed at the very least a basic copyediting, as many commas are missing and Lucinda occasionally phrases things in a confusing way. There are a lot of places where she repeats herself, sometimes on the same page or even in the same paragraph. It also could have used a structural editor to help organize some sections in a way that flowed better and maybe cut out some of the bad amateur philosophizing, like the awful lot of telling you about how she is going to tell you her life story at the very beginning. I skimmed over it because it was paragraphs of this:
"I am not writing only in English. I am writing in the universal language of love and a mix of my knowledge of Japanese, Chinese, French, German, and English languages (and these days a little bit of colorful Italian). “You are the product of many languages,” I would be told often, a wonderful legacy except when you try to speak all of them at once, but I accept that as my charm. I will write from each culture that I lived and surrounded myself with and, with each stroke of the pen I will create and paint a movement as I have done through my skating. I believe that unlike words, the body never lies when it moves to express itself. So, instead of just writing words, what if I write with my expressions that stem from my heart and then ultimately flow through my fingers? Is that not movement and dance as well? Then my words truly will never lie. I also believe that whether you want to acknowledge it or not the truth has always been and will always be, present."
She also made the bizarre decision not to name anyone outside of her family, even though a) all of her coaches are listed on Wikipedia and the others are internationally competitive athletes and b) she makes it bleedingly obvious who she means each time if you know much about skating, or have a search engine at hand. She super admired the woman half of the Olympic gold medalist pair team when she was nine? Why can't she simply say she liked Gordeeva, who she's already been open about admiring? If you want to talk about how poorly Toller Cranston treated you, have the guts to write his name instead of 'he was a Canadian coach known for his artistry who really really liked painting and had a house in Mexico'. And if your book is not about the people you refuse to name, maybe you could leave out the story of how you saw another skater self-harming from stress, after qualifying that you're talking about a female singles Swiss champion somewhat older than you known for her innovative and fast spins (pretty clearly Krieg).
Anyway, I wasn't sure I was going to finish the book at first, because Lucinda comes off as really annoying for much of the first third or so. She seems to be amazing at everything she does - her family is obviously very rich, she's super fashionable, she refuses to cheat on runs like the other skaters but somehow beats them to the finish line every single time (but still never got appreciated by the coaches oh noes), she gets amazing grades and wins awards and leads in every school play and wins every fitness test and graduates early, the Japanese federation just loved her soooo much that they invited her specially to competitions because she was always the most artistic and most spinny. (Okay, that one I can believe, because she was very very spinny - and no, she doesn't have any secrets to spill about how she got that way.)
Lucinda clearly wants to be seen as humble, but then she talks herself up all the time. She's the most popular with fans, she's all over the TV, she's the star of every show; at least she doesn't pretend everyone loved her (she's actually quite straightforward about not having been very social with other skaters). Even the early mentions that her family was unhappy don't do much to combat this, perhaps because they're mostly quick asides. At the same time, she also comes off as strangely helpless in the earlier chapters, like saying that when she was eight she couldn't even put on her skates by herself, and that when she had to go to a summer camp for a week, she spent hours every day curled up crying on the phone to her parents.
She occasionally makes strange claims. For example, she repeatedly says that she didn't go through puberty at all until she was in her mid-twenties and was completely flat-chested even at nineteen. Look, I absolutely believe that she grew more after she quit skating - that happens with some athletes - that her height may not have been an issue during her career as people sometimes mention, and that she didn't fully go through puberty until she quit skating. But, um, you can clearly see she has boobs and has started developing curves in videos of her skating as a teenager.
She also states that the Swiss fed made sure she placed second at Nationals 'almost every year', sent their preferred winner to Euros, and then called her up to do Worlds when their chosen champion failed to do well at Euros. I believe in general that this happened - you can clearly see in her results that they kept sending her to Worlds instead of the national champion in years outside of the one she won - but she was only second at Nats twice, so there seems to be exaggeration happening. And as far as I can find, that year when she was national champion barely gets a mention.
Aaaaand then it gets weird, and this is where the book started to get more compelling. She swerves from talking about how amazingly wonderful, so amazing, so dedicated, so wonderful mother was a great cook, the steadiest presence in her life, literally couldn't bear the thought of living without her - that same mother she's been praising so much also physically beat her all the time. Lucinda sprinkles paragraphs of describing her terror and how her mom wrested her out of bed in the middle of the night or wouldn't let her off the ice if she wasn't happy and so on - vividly written and painful to read, despite the grammar issues - with justifications about how her mom was stressed, it wasn't entirely her fault! It was like she was a different person when she was abusive, so it wasn't really her!
As an outsider to her life, it made me think that she needs some therapy to deal with all the abuse she was put through. She goes back to talking about how amaaaaaazing her parents were, has she told you they were the best possible parents enough times yet, before mentioning the beatings again and that she was afraid to get off the ice when she was in incredible pain because her mom would be angry. In a later chapter, she describes being beaten for two hours while on a train and feeling like she would die, but defends her mom as being rightfully set off and not to blame. And then later again, it's one paragraph of 'my mom when through so much to drive me everywhere when I was so underweight and weak I could barely get out of bed :)' followed by 'and then when I told her I wanted to stop skating, she beat me again :( but she's perfect!!'
It was emotional whiplash. Her dad was mostly absent for much of her life due to work, but she says that he also didn't he believe her about being beaten and, along with her mom, believed a doctor's lol it's in your head over her when she had a physically obvious injury that could have left her paralyzed. I honestly just felt really sorry and sad for her.
It's pretty clear that she and her mom were co-dependent, and Lucinda only spent a small amount of time living independently before her health forced her back to her parents. Her mom wrote the afterword, but honestly, I could barely read it after everything Lucinda said about her; she kind of tries to take some responsibility and admits that maybe she shouldn't have forced Lucinda to try to be perfect. I felt like Lucinda was still very tangled up with her mom in a lot of ways and can't help but wonder if she had really fully processed everything that had happened in her life when she wrote this.
In general, there is SO MUCH physical and emotional abuse going on, not just from her mom to her but from coaches towards the skaters. And also just ridiculous behavior, like demanding that seven-year-old Lucinda needs to prove her devotion to skating by training for hours every day by herself for months, or not showing up to the rink half the time. (She makes this claim about Cranston. And also said he wanted her to do a fully backloaded free program with all the jumps in the last minute? Yeesh.) Lucinda also starts to explicitly state at some point that she was being overtrained and had a terrible do-not-rest mindset drilled into her, instead of just rolling out her daily schedule as a child and letting you notice that it has only six hours of sleep in it.
She said that she was in pain every time she skated since she was only 11 :( and she's very clear that the enormous amounts of physical exercise she and her coaches put her through and pushing through injuries were really really bad for her. If it's true that Christy Ness and her husband accused her of faking severe injuries and pain, then fuck them both. Lucinda also mentions that she repeatedly hit her head on the ice and paid it no mind, and sometimes fainted in the middle of spins. Somehow she managed to push herself to skate in shows through a fucking spinal fracture and an increasingly terrible illness that she couldn't get diagnosed.
A lot of the later part of book deals with her cratering health in painful detail - it gets hard to read at parts; I can't imagine how on Earth she had any kind of life with all that going on, let alone kept skating in shows. Spoiler alert: on the verge of giving up, they found a doctor who told them that she had been spinning so hard and so much that it gave her mini-concussions, fucking up not just her brain but her nervous system (and therefore her immune response), her pituitary gland (and therefore her hormones), her inner ear, etc. Which made sense for her... but this doctor also treated her concussed brain with chiropracty and homeopathy, both of which are fake medicine, so I have to say, I wonder about his diagnostic abilities. He did at least get her to finally, finally stop and give her body the rest it desperately needed, it seems.
I know that's a lot of negatives and downers, but there were also some good parts that weren't so depressing. It was interesting to read about her variety of training environments, since she trained in quite different countries (Japan, Canada, US, China, Switzerland briefly) and in extremely different environments. For instance, the Chinese training center was a bare dorm in a rural area, and they got one kettle of hot water a day. Though this was the first coach she liked and who appears to have treated her kindly for the most part (well, he did want her to lose weight when she was so underweight she still had not experienced menses), she kept getting very sick with no real medical care.
Also, the part where she had to play espionage to get coaching during a summer camp (her former Chinese coach was at the camp, but had been told on the plane trip that he wasn't allowed to coach her during it despite everyone being told it was okay beforehand) was hilarious. Secret coaching! Hand signals! Taking different paths to meet up in the woods! Is there any drama like skating drama?
She has a great-yet-terrifying story from her show days - they were doing a show in the Caribbean, and the pipes under the rink kept bursting and making mini-fountains on the ice. But they didn't have time to re-do it, and the organizers refused to cancel the show, so they... just skated around the mini-fountains. And to mark them, they put potted plants over top of them! Which they could barely see under the spotlight! On the one hand, it's a miracle nobody hurt themselves - on the other, the mental image of all these skaters hopping over an increasing number of potted plants as the days went by is amazing.
And while most of the skating and ice metaphors were pretty forced, this one was good:
"It was like when my skating coach used to say, “Do it just one more, one last time.” But that one more time was never just one more time. It was again and again and again."
...yeah, my coach does that, too.
Overall... as Lucinda admits at the beginning, this isn't really a book about skating. She goes into some detail about a few of her performances, but skips over a lot; for all she talks about spins, she says very little about the actual spins. It's mostly the memoir of someone who spent two decades in an extremely abusive athletic career and doesn't seem to have completely found her distance from it yet.
Reading: There are some books on my childhood bookshelf that I never did get around to reading, so I grabbed one at random: "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm". I read the first chapter, then put it down to google when "Anne of Green Gables" came out because it felt like such a rip-off, but nope, it came out a few years ahead.
I have to say, it has been a long time since I read "Anne", but I'm pretty sure she was a lot less annoying then Rebecca. Rebecca is quirky, constantly makes small mistakes but never has a mean thought, is instaloved by everyone around her (except the designated villains, who come around on her anyway), has literal paragraphs devoted to how amazingly deep and soulful her eyes are, and is studious and generous and and never seems to be bad at anything. The writing is amusing enough to keep me going (though it gets very tell-y at points), but it's a lot. Also was not expecting the adult man - from my 2021 perspective - grooming the pair of ten-year-olds. I hope he is not actually a love interest, but those hopes are not feeling high.
To read: I might polish off another book from the shelf while I'm here, but after that - University of Chicago is having a 75% off sale on their ebooks through 8/23, and Allekha + cheap nonfiction = yes, please. Sadly, many of their books are not available as ebooks, at least on their site, but I still found lots to consider. Do I really need a book on timekeeping in Edo Japan? Probably not, but it could be research for something!
Reading this was a weird experience.
So, on some levels, it is not very good; it needed at the very least a basic copyediting, as many commas are missing and Lucinda occasionally phrases things in a confusing way. There are a lot of places where she repeats herself, sometimes on the same page or even in the same paragraph. It also could have used a structural editor to help organize some sections in a way that flowed better and maybe cut out some of the bad amateur philosophizing, like the awful lot of telling you about how she is going to tell you her life story at the very beginning. I skimmed over it because it was paragraphs of this:
"I am not writing only in English. I am writing in the universal language of love and a mix of my knowledge of Japanese, Chinese, French, German, and English languages (and these days a little bit of colorful Italian). “You are the product of many languages,” I would be told often, a wonderful legacy except when you try to speak all of them at once, but I accept that as my charm. I will write from each culture that I lived and surrounded myself with and, with each stroke of the pen I will create and paint a movement as I have done through my skating. I believe that unlike words, the body never lies when it moves to express itself. So, instead of just writing words, what if I write with my expressions that stem from my heart and then ultimately flow through my fingers? Is that not movement and dance as well? Then my words truly will never lie. I also believe that whether you want to acknowledge it or not the truth has always been and will always be, present."
She also made the bizarre decision not to name anyone outside of her family, even though a) all of her coaches are listed on Wikipedia and the others are internationally competitive athletes and b) she makes it bleedingly obvious who she means each time if you know much about skating, or have a search engine at hand. She super admired the woman half of the Olympic gold medalist pair team when she was nine? Why can't she simply say she liked Gordeeva, who she's already been open about admiring? If you want to talk about how poorly Toller Cranston treated you, have the guts to write his name instead of 'he was a Canadian coach known for his artistry who really really liked painting and had a house in Mexico'. And if your book is not about the people you refuse to name, maybe you could leave out the story of how you saw another skater self-harming from stress, after qualifying that you're talking about a female singles Swiss champion somewhat older than you known for her innovative and fast spins (pretty clearly Krieg).
Anyway, I wasn't sure I was going to finish the book at first, because Lucinda comes off as really annoying for much of the first third or so. She seems to be amazing at everything she does - her family is obviously very rich, she's super fashionable, she refuses to cheat on runs like the other skaters but somehow beats them to the finish line every single time (but still never got appreciated by the coaches oh noes), she gets amazing grades and wins awards and leads in every school play and wins every fitness test and graduates early, the Japanese federation just loved her soooo much that they invited her specially to competitions because she was always the most artistic and most spinny. (Okay, that one I can believe, because she was very very spinny - and no, she doesn't have any secrets to spill about how she got that way.)
Lucinda clearly wants to be seen as humble, but then she talks herself up all the time. She's the most popular with fans, she's all over the TV, she's the star of every show; at least she doesn't pretend everyone loved her (she's actually quite straightforward about not having been very social with other skaters). Even the early mentions that her family was unhappy don't do much to combat this, perhaps because they're mostly quick asides. At the same time, she also comes off as strangely helpless in the earlier chapters, like saying that when she was eight she couldn't even put on her skates by herself, and that when she had to go to a summer camp for a week, she spent hours every day curled up crying on the phone to her parents.
She occasionally makes strange claims. For example, she repeatedly says that she didn't go through puberty at all until she was in her mid-twenties and was completely flat-chested even at nineteen. Look, I absolutely believe that she grew more after she quit skating - that happens with some athletes - that her height may not have been an issue during her career as people sometimes mention, and that she didn't fully go through puberty until she quit skating. But, um, you can clearly see she has boobs and has started developing curves in videos of her skating as a teenager.
She also states that the Swiss fed made sure she placed second at Nationals 'almost every year', sent their preferred winner to Euros, and then called her up to do Worlds when their chosen champion failed to do well at Euros. I believe in general that this happened - you can clearly see in her results that they kept sending her to Worlds instead of the national champion in years outside of the one she won - but she was only second at Nats twice, so there seems to be exaggeration happening. And as far as I can find, that year when she was national champion barely gets a mention.
Aaaaand then it gets weird, and this is where the book started to get more compelling. She swerves from talking about how amazingly wonderful, so amazing, so dedicated, so wonderful mother was a great cook, the steadiest presence in her life, literally couldn't bear the thought of living without her - that same mother she's been praising so much also physically beat her all the time. Lucinda sprinkles paragraphs of describing her terror and how her mom wrested her out of bed in the middle of the night or wouldn't let her off the ice if she wasn't happy and so on - vividly written and painful to read, despite the grammar issues - with justifications about how her mom was stressed, it wasn't entirely her fault! It was like she was a different person when she was abusive, so it wasn't really her!
As an outsider to her life, it made me think that she needs some therapy to deal with all the abuse she was put through. She goes back to talking about how amaaaaaazing her parents were, has she told you they were the best possible parents enough times yet, before mentioning the beatings again and that she was afraid to get off the ice when she was in incredible pain because her mom would be angry. In a later chapter, she describes being beaten for two hours while on a train and feeling like she would die, but defends her mom as being rightfully set off and not to blame. And then later again, it's one paragraph of 'my mom when through so much to drive me everywhere when I was so underweight and weak I could barely get out of bed :)' followed by 'and then when I told her I wanted to stop skating, she beat me again :( but she's perfect!!'
It was emotional whiplash. Her dad was mostly absent for much of her life due to work, but she says that he also didn't he believe her about being beaten and, along with her mom, believed a doctor's lol it's in your head over her when she had a physically obvious injury that could have left her paralyzed. I honestly just felt really sorry and sad for her.
It's pretty clear that she and her mom were co-dependent, and Lucinda only spent a small amount of time living independently before her health forced her back to her parents. Her mom wrote the afterword, but honestly, I could barely read it after everything Lucinda said about her; she kind of tries to take some responsibility and admits that maybe she shouldn't have forced Lucinda to try to be perfect. I felt like Lucinda was still very tangled up with her mom in a lot of ways and can't help but wonder if she had really fully processed everything that had happened in her life when she wrote this.
In general, there is SO MUCH physical and emotional abuse going on, not just from her mom to her but from coaches towards the skaters. And also just ridiculous behavior, like demanding that seven-year-old Lucinda needs to prove her devotion to skating by training for hours every day by herself for months, or not showing up to the rink half the time. (She makes this claim about Cranston. And also said he wanted her to do a fully backloaded free program with all the jumps in the last minute? Yeesh.) Lucinda also starts to explicitly state at some point that she was being overtrained and had a terrible do-not-rest mindset drilled into her, instead of just rolling out her daily schedule as a child and letting you notice that it has only six hours of sleep in it.
She said that she was in pain every time she skated since she was only 11 :( and she's very clear that the enormous amounts of physical exercise she and her coaches put her through and pushing through injuries were really really bad for her. If it's true that Christy Ness and her husband accused her of faking severe injuries and pain, then fuck them both. Lucinda also mentions that she repeatedly hit her head on the ice and paid it no mind, and sometimes fainted in the middle of spins. Somehow she managed to push herself to skate in shows through a fucking spinal fracture and an increasingly terrible illness that she couldn't get diagnosed.
A lot of the later part of book deals with her cratering health in painful detail - it gets hard to read at parts; I can't imagine how on Earth she had any kind of life with all that going on, let alone kept skating in shows. Spoiler alert: on the verge of giving up, they found a doctor who told them that she had been spinning so hard and so much that it gave her mini-concussions, fucking up not just her brain but her nervous system (and therefore her immune response), her pituitary gland (and therefore her hormones), her inner ear, etc. Which made sense for her... but this doctor also treated her concussed brain with chiropracty and homeopathy, both of which are fake medicine, so I have to say, I wonder about his diagnostic abilities. He did at least get her to finally, finally stop and give her body the rest it desperately needed, it seems.
I know that's a lot of negatives and downers, but there were also some good parts that weren't so depressing. It was interesting to read about her variety of training environments, since she trained in quite different countries (Japan, Canada, US, China, Switzerland briefly) and in extremely different environments. For instance, the Chinese training center was a bare dorm in a rural area, and they got one kettle of hot water a day. Though this was the first coach she liked and who appears to have treated her kindly for the most part (well, he did want her to lose weight when she was so underweight she still had not experienced menses), she kept getting very sick with no real medical care.
Also, the part where she had to play espionage to get coaching during a summer camp (her former Chinese coach was at the camp, but had been told on the plane trip that he wasn't allowed to coach her during it despite everyone being told it was okay beforehand) was hilarious. Secret coaching! Hand signals! Taking different paths to meet up in the woods! Is there any drama like skating drama?
She has a great-yet-terrifying story from her show days - they were doing a show in the Caribbean, and the pipes under the rink kept bursting and making mini-fountains on the ice. But they didn't have time to re-do it, and the organizers refused to cancel the show, so they... just skated around the mini-fountains. And to mark them, they put potted plants over top of them! Which they could barely see under the spotlight! On the one hand, it's a miracle nobody hurt themselves - on the other, the mental image of all these skaters hopping over an increasing number of potted plants as the days went by is amazing.
And while most of the skating and ice metaphors were pretty forced, this one was good:
"It was like when my skating coach used to say, “Do it just one more, one last time.” But that one more time was never just one more time. It was again and again and again."
...yeah, my coach does that, too.
Overall... as Lucinda admits at the beginning, this isn't really a book about skating. She goes into some detail about a few of her performances, but skips over a lot; for all she talks about spins, she says very little about the actual spins. It's mostly the memoir of someone who spent two decades in an extremely abusive athletic career and doesn't seem to have completely found her distance from it yet.
Reading: There are some books on my childhood bookshelf that I never did get around to reading, so I grabbed one at random: "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm". I read the first chapter, then put it down to google when "Anne of Green Gables" came out because it felt like such a rip-off, but nope, it came out a few years ahead.
I have to say, it has been a long time since I read "Anne", but I'm pretty sure she was a lot less annoying then Rebecca. Rebecca is quirky, constantly makes small mistakes but never has a mean thought, is instaloved by everyone around her (except the designated villains, who come around on her anyway), has literal paragraphs devoted to how amazingly deep and soulful her eyes are, and is studious and generous and and never seems to be bad at anything. The writing is amusing enough to keep me going (though it gets very tell-y at points), but it's a lot. Also was not expecting the adult man - from my 2021 perspective - grooming the pair of ten-year-olds. I hope he is not actually a love interest, but those hopes are not feeling high.
To read: I might polish off another book from the shelf while I'm here, but after that - University of Chicago is having a 75% off sale on their ebooks through 8/23, and Allekha + cheap nonfiction = yes, please. Sadly, many of their books are not available as ebooks, at least on their site, but I still found lots to consider. Do I really need a book on timekeeping in Edo Japan? Probably not, but it could be research for something!
