The Unmaking of a Dancer

The Unmaking of a Dancer sheds a blistering light on the raw, fiercely competitive and often vicious world of ballet: the truth behind the fiction of Black Swan. It's the story of Joan Brady's life in her own words. Ballet was the first thing Brady was good at; she really was good, too, performing professionally with the San Francisco Ballet at the tender age of fourteen.

A bonus was that lessons and performances kept her away from her unpredictable father and formidable mother. But nobody ...