If You Say So

Michelle Herman took her first-ever ballet class at the age of 62, and it changed her life. If You Say So is a book of true stories about loss and reinvention, longing and loneliness, friendship and community, and family and home-and dance, the dedicated practice of which has led her on an unexpected new path. This is a book about grief and the way it lives in the body-and joy, and the way it lives in the body too.

From the making of a pandemic-era dance film-the dancers masked, outdoors, six feet apart-to the sudden, shocking loss of a friend and fellow (sister) dancer three years later; from the challenges and delights of making art to the challenges and delights of motherhood and daughterhood, this book is a love letter to Herman’s life as she enters her seventh decade, and to everyone and everything, human and nonhuman both, who’s filled her life with their love.

If You Say So is chock full of dances I’ve never attempted, meals I’ve never cooked, songs I’ve never sung, and people I’ve never loved or grieved, but Michelle Herman’s beautiful writing reminds me that experience is metaphor: Her stories leave us thinking about our own. In essays that are funny, self-effacing, heartbreaking, and wise, she shows us that life, in all of its choreography and improvisation, really is like ballet: ＂Press down and rise at the same time. Descend and lift.＂ -Maggie Smith, NY Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful