Chalked Up: My Life in Gymnastics

Off Balance vividly delineates each of the dominating characters who contributed to Moceanu’s rise to the top, from her stubborn father and long-suffering mother to her mercurial coach, Bela Karolyi. Here, Moceanu finally shares the haunting stories of competition, her years of hiding injuries and pain out of fear of retribution from her coaches, and how she hit rock bottom after a public battle with her parents.

But medals, murder plots, drugs, and daring escapes aside (all of which figure into Moceanu’s incredible journey), the most unique aspect of her life is the family secret that Moceanu discovers, opening a new and unexpected chapter in her adult life. A mysterious letter from a stranger reveals that she has a second sister—born with a physical disability and given away at birth—who has nonetheless followed in Moceanu’s footsteps in an astonishing way.

A multilayered memoir that transcends the world of sports, Off Balance will touch anyone who has ever dared to dream of a better life.

For eighteen years I was a prisoner. I was an object for someone to use and abuse.

For eighteen years I was not allowed to speak my own name. I became a mother and was forced to be a sister. For eighteen years I survived an impossible situation.

On August 26, 2009, I took my name back. My name is Jaycee Lee Dugard. I don’t think of myself as a victim. I survived.

A Stolen Life is my story—in my own words, in my own way, exactly as I remember it.

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The pine cone is a symbol that represents the seed of a new beginning for me. To help facilitate new beginnings, with the support of animal-assisted therapy, the J A Y C Foundation provides support and services for the timely treatment of families recovering from abduction and the aftermath of traumatic experiences—families like my own who need to learn how to heal. In addition, the J A Y C Foundation hopes to facilitate awareness in schools about the important need to care for one another.

Our motto is “Just Ask Yourself to . . . Care!”

A portion of my proceeds from this memoir will be donated to The J A Y C Foundation Inc.

A Globe and Mail top 100 book of 2012

"A fascinating, well-researched, and insightful book...this is an important story to tell." -- Sabina Allemann, former principal ballerina, San Francisco Ballet

"A literary dance of narrative and emotion that pirouettes between rage and sorrow, backstage bleakness, and transcendent beauty." -- Elizabeth Abbott author of A History of Mistresses

A controversial look at the brutal backstage existence of some of the world's most celebrated ballerinas.

Throughout her history, the ballerina has been perceived as the embodiment of beauty and perfection. She is the feminine ideal -- unblemished and ethereal, inspiration incarnate. But the reality is another story. Beginning with the earliest ballerinas, who often led double lives as concubines, Deirdre Kelly goes on to review the troubled lives of nineteenth-century ballerinas, who lived in poverty and worked under torturous and even life-threatening conditions. In the twentieth century, George Balanchine created a contradictory ballet culture that simultaneously idealized and oppressed ballerinas, and many of his dancers suffered from anorexia and bulimia or underwent cosmetic surgery to achieve the ideal ethereal form. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, ballerinas are still underpaid, vulnerable to arbitrary discrimination and dismissal, and expected to bear pain stoically -- but much of this is beginning to change.

As Kelly examines the lives of some of the world's best ballerinas -- Anna Pavlova, Marie Camargo, Gelsey Kirkland, Evelyn Hart, and Misty Copeland, among others -- she argues for a rethinking of the world's most graceful dance form -- a rethinking that would position the ballerina at its heart, where she belongs.