REVIEW: Spinning – Passion and Fear
Raves
In Spinning, Tillie Walden takes readers on a trip down memory lane as she shares her stories from her competitive ice skating days, both in and out of the rink. Along the way, we get glimpses of her internal struggles as a gay female teenager going through different forms of heartbreak, trauma, and depression. The […]
In Spinning, Tillie Walden takes readers on a trip down memory lane as she shares her stories from her competitive ice skating days, both in and out of the rink. Along the way, we get glimpses of her internal struggles as a gay female teenager going through different forms of heartbreak, trauma, and depression.
The story flows in a very fluid way. There was no sense of abruptness in between chapters and within each chapter. I also like how each chapter was named after a certain move in ice skating and how it links to her emotional state during that particular period in her life. While a good story for me has to have that fluidity across the board, Spinning’s edge was the emotional weight Walden brought to it.
Of all the biographies and memoirs I’ve encountered, I don’t think any of them carried as much emotional weight as Spinning did. The story hits close to home for Walden as she not only provides a narrative, especially for some of the darker moments of her life. The illustrations that go along with the narrative amplify the emotions she manages to draw out (no pun intended) from the reader, whatever they may be. For me, they were a mix of elation and despair. If you ever had a moment when you look back on some good memories in your life and suddenly remember bad ones linked to them, Spinning dials it up to 11.
What was once Tillie Walden’s thesis for the Center for Cartoon Studies served as both a compelling story and a form of therapy. Spinning may provide a similar narrative to other memoirs about people who overcome adversities throughout their lives to get to where they are right now, but it carries a different story. Walden doesn’t aim to inspire or do anything else but tell her story to anyone who’s willing to listen (or in this case, read). The challenge for her was to find that balance between passion and fear as she shared her story. And I believe her efforts paid off.