Destined for a life on the stage, [Ellen O’Connell Whittet](https://www.instagram.com/oconnellwhittet/) was devastated when an accident in rehearsal shattered not only her body, but her dreams of becoming a professional ballerina. Whittet’s stunning debut memoir _What You Become In Flight_ is a page-turning exploration of the toxicity that is born out of an environment in which everybody is always replaceable. Though the memoir grows out of ballet, it takes a deep dive into the overarching forces that control women’s bodies, told through the tale of how Whittet’s forced abandonment of ballet led her into uncharted territory.
Flaunt is pleased to offer an excerpt from _What You Become In Flight,_ alongside an exclusive Q&A with Ellen O’Connell Whittet. _What You Become In Flight_ — out now via Melville House — can be purchased [here](https://www.amazon.com/s?adid=082VK13VJJCZTQYGWWCZ&campaign=211041&creative=374001&i=stripbooks&k=What%20You%20Become%20in%20Flight&ref=x_gr_w_bb_sout&tag=x_gr_w_bb_sout-20).
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My first semester of graduate school, I saw a woman lying dead on the pavement somewhere on Sixth Avenue, somewhere between Broome and Vandam. A police officer squatted over her, playing with his phone while he waited for backup. People passed by as though it was not at all strange or shocking that she was lying there, reminding us of our own mortality, right in the midst of a Saturday afternoon. When I caught sight of her, she was on my left-hand side, and I looked away so quickly that I have always doubted my own memory. Her lying there, the pavement under her cold and as gray as the sky above her.
It felt like an undignified ending to have New Yorkers step around you, barely glancing down. At least that’s how I remember it as a twenty-two-year-old away from home. Seeing a person freshly gone filled me with a dread so profound it hung over me for days once the shock had worn off, and I never felt the same way about Soho again. It is a clever trick of the mind that I forgot where this was, exactly, because I never avoided a street corner so much as I did a memory of a ghost, conjured even now each time I smell a pretzel cart or see a lovely Christmas display in a store window.
I had been on my way to a Spanish grocery store to buy some smoked paprika for my mother, who told me she had started using it when she cooked. Somehow, I thought if I could find it and send it to her, I could bridge the gap between us, between the discoveries we were making without each other. So I kept walking to the store, determined to keep living.
I imagined the final moments of the woman in an office building stories above—the smooth plastic of a wooden-looking desk beneath her feet before she jumped. She could have spread her palms over the panes of glass, which trapped the December air outside the room. She would have stood for just a moment, looking out over the city of New York, full of people looking askance at each other as they passed through the veins of boulevards. Maybe she stood on her desk as though the figurehead on a great ship, with all the sound turned down to a peaceful lull. Papers stacked on her desk, her potted plant watered. This all began years before, perhaps with an isolated incident, or perhaps with a slow-spreading disease that began in her aching temples and worked its way down to the arches of her feet. So she did the only thing she could think of. She found the latch of the window and opened it. Her hands were not shaking; that would have passed long before.
And just as easily as a dropped napkin or a scattered dandelion in a wind gust, the woman jumped. Or at least that is what I imagine happened in order to give myself a story to cling onto rather than a lifeless body to puzzle over.
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“Have you ever seen a dead body?” a boy had asked me earlier that year, as we sat together in a late-night restaurant in Santa Barbara. We sat close together in a wooden booth, facing one another, knees touching under the table. He was someone I knew from college— the one who had watched me in my final performance.
“My grandparents,” I had said. Although having been raised Catholic, I had been to plenty of wakes, and had once served mass for a child who had died, the tiny coffin dwarfed by the flower arrangements on either side of it.
“You’ve never seen one on the street?” He had picked me up from a ballet rehearsal because he liked sitting in the theater watching me for the final five minutes and then waiting for me to change into the clothes of a pedestrian. From far away he memorized the shape of my legs, and then at dinner he touched them up close.
“No.” I replied. He always tried to point out the ways I was young, naïve, although I was never sure what he was trying to prove. “I don’t think there is anyone who grows up in South America who has not seen a dead body on the street. In Spanish we call it _besando el pavimento_. Kissing the pavement,” he said. I remember
thinking how unlikely it would be to stumble on a dead body. Kissing the pavement is a romantic phrase that belies its malignancy. Kissing the pavement was a poetic way to say that a body had stopped working as it was designed to, that it had stopped working at all.
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When the woman on the pavement landed, her body tried to keep right on crashing through the sidewalk. Although the skin on the woman’s face was just skin, there was something horribly distorted now, a certain and soundless shatter of her bone structure until it was not a face, but one continuous line of eyes and nose and mouth, all vertically arranged. The way her face was turned it looked like she had her ear pressed to the sidewalk to hear what was beneath. One arm was flung behind her body. I don’t think I could have invented that image.
New York and its ability to look away from life’s most shocking images was teaching me exactly what I could adjust to. I learned to keep warm in cold weather and to live frugally in a city too expensive for graduate students. A few days a week I caught the Harlem train from Grand Central Station and ended up in Bronxville, where I walked up a steep and often icy hill to Sarah Lawrence College. In old dark rooms we sat around tables discussing literature—the classics and our own—and because I was so homesick, nearly everything made me cry. After classes, when I took the train home, I took long walks to get to know Manhattan too—miles and miles—and ended up finding something new each time.
Though I had dedicated years to the MFA, it was difficult to know where to enter my own writing. I wrote about boys I’d liked who hadn’t liked me back, or fights I’d had with my parents, or a trip my family took on a boat when my brother was my greatest companion, but none of it felt compelling or urgent in any satisfying way. I thought by focusing on smaller-scale pursuits—finding the paprika, a small park to read in, a cup of tea better than I made at home—they would give shape to my homesickness, and the dreadful embarrassment I felt at being so adrift.
I called my parents in California and told them what I had seen. The next week, I told my thesis advisor at Sarah Lawrence, a woman named Jo Ann, who said, “If I saw a dead woman on the street, that would be a metaphor I’d return to over and over.” That week, I wrote my first essay about ballet: about my big fall and injured back and my own anchored body on my parents’ floor, my own vulnerable body in recline, which the dead woman must have stirred in me.
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_It seems that the chapter featured here (chapter 10) is strong point of crossover between your old and new lives and the symbols that accompany each part. When did you realize that the dead woman was the key in unlocking your ability to write about ballet and talk about the snake?_
I didn’t realize until a few other people pointed it out to me, namely my thesis advisor, Jo Ann Beard, who always had an eye for the symbols from our own lives that might be useful in our writing, and my therapist, who kept asking me why I brought up snakes when I told her I saw a dead woman. That chapter has been in this book since its earliest drafts, years ago. It might actually be the one that has survived the longest because it felt like a lynchpin, a recognition of where I had been and where I was headed. It had both everything and nothing to do with ballet, but what was important was how fixated I became on it in my writing.
_In the first line of chapter 1, you say "Some people think of dancing as an expression of their power and passion, or as a hidden language only the body speaks. I envy those people for their effortless belief that dancing is more feeling than careful application of technique." How has expanding to less rigid and technique-heavy styles changed your perception, if at all?_
Seeing dance as being more freeform than rigid has healed my relationship to the dance world in many ways. When I take classes now, mainly modern or hip hop, I still think more than I wish I did about technique, getting the steps right, the way I look doing them. But I think about how it _feels_ more than I did in ballet. And I think this works in writing as well. Writing is a careful application of technique in many ways, but the best writing transcends rules. Writing and dance are more than formal study. They’re application of that study to express something that cannot be confined. The best dance, like the best writing, bulges at the seams without breaking them open. It pushes against what we learn to express why we bother learning it.
_In my own experience as both a dancer and a writer, I feel as though the two complement each other well. What do you think is the connection between dancing and writing?_
Both are ways to express our hearts’ overflow, both use bodies to make meaning and store memories, and both are undervalued as serious modes of formal study. The pivot from dance to writing has always felt like one continuous line in inquiry to me. Both are entire worlds you can live in all day, internal and consuming, before you remember the rest of your life. And I find both dancing and writing so gratifying. I’m proud after I’ve worked hard at either. I’m sure other people would have other answers about the connection, but two forms so much about trying to say the unsayable must affect us all in similar ways.
_Writing about a very precise and technical art form must be quite difficult, especially if you expect that a large portion of your readers don't have a ballet background. How did you adjust to ensure that the book remained accessible to someone who has never taken a ballet class in their life?_
This is where other readers came in so handy. My husband, agent, friends who read early drafts, all were able to tell me when my references assumed a certain amount of knowledge of the dance world that they didn’t think I should assume. A very eye-opening moment came when my husband told me he’d never heard of Martha Graham before he met me. My agent told me to explain what “barre” was in a ballet class. Taking a step back from the world and trying to think of the conversations I’d had with people outside of ballet, what interested them, what they knew, what questions they’d asked, helped me think of ways to include far more readers in my pages.
_From the very beginning — even before your birth — through the end, a lot of the book examines the relationships that the women in your family have to each other, dance, and the body. Has being pregnant with your daughter made you examine this in a different way than you do in the book? What from your matrilineal line do you wish to pass onto her?_
Yes, absolutely! So many people have asked me if I’d enroll her in ballet lessons, for example. I’m certainly not against ballet at all, but am all for questioning who benefits and who suffers in any system. Who has power and who doesn’t. So I hope my daughter learns that, just as I have. As the world has changed, women, including those in my family, have learned to ask bigger and more pointed questions. But like my family passed on to me, I hope to bequeath her with a love for the arts, for self-expression, and with the belief that such love isn’t frivolous or selfish but vital.
_You offer up a piece of advice for your future daughter. Now that she is less of an idea and just mere days away from being born, what else would you want her to know?_
I want her to think about how she feels more than she thinks about how she looks. I want her to know women are held to different standards, and to always question those standards. I want her to know joy and love, of herself and her family and her body. I want her to know that each generation has more freedom than the last, and do much better than I do.
_What advice would you give to your teenage self?_
I would tell her to relax and to have more faith in her life. To keep reading books, to enjoy ballet but enjoy other things as well. That the unrequited crushes wouldn’t even be a chapter in my memoir.
Courtesy of Melville House
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