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“H-5, can you straighten out that right shoulder?” I was 13, and H-5 was the number pinned to my leotard at an audition for New York’s High School of Performing Arts. Was I slouching? Pulling myself up a little taller, I began pirouetting to a waltz from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Almost immediately, I heard a curt “Thank you.” The audition was over. They had rejected me for “deviations of the hip and spine.” I was devastated. Was I really malformed? An orthopedist soon confirmed that I had minor scoliosis and legs that turned slightly inward. It meant nothing — unless I wanted a career in ballet. That would never happen.

Decades later, my failed attempt to become a ballerina is still implausibly vivid. I know I’m not the only woman who can recall a difficult early experience of having her body deemed too flawed for ballet. This is a central subject of Alice Robb’s compelling new book, Don’t Think, Dear: On Loving and Leaving Ballet.

Robb, a journalist who is also the author of Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey, had a long-shot dream of ballet stardom into which she invested and achieved more than most. It was most definitely transformative. In 2001, she secured a coveted spot in the School of American Ballet (SAB) and hoped to join the New York City Ballet eventually. But by age 12, she found herself worrying that she wasn’t quite the physical ideal espoused by the school’s late founder, George Balanchine: a half-starved waif. Balanchine died in 1983, but his philosophy on dance and dancers resonated long after. His “insane dieting advice,” says Robb, was “eat nothing”; the title of her book comes from another of his edicts.

Robb delves into the troubling litany of #Metoo abuses in the company’s history — including Balanchine’s penchant for sexually pursuing his much younger employees. His successor, Peter

Author Alice Robb observes hopeful signs that this insular world may be spinning away from what one dancer in the book describes as a “very niche, very beautiful pain cult.”

Martins, resigned in 2018 amid sexual misconduct allegations by several dancers, which he denied. Other dancers, Robb says, closed ranks around Martins. “For years, they had starved for him and slept with him,” she observes. “Now they would stay silent for him.”

SAB carried out an “end-of-year culling,” says Robb, and after three years there, she was expelled. Don’t Think, Dear is less a memoir than it is a feminist interrogation of the world of ballet as the author experienced it: “How had growing up in a world where our looks were constantly critiqued, where abusive men were in charge, where we learned to talk with our bodies instead of our voices, affected our lives?” she asks.

Robb plumbs not only her own experience but also those described in other dancers’ memoirs, including Gelsey Kirkland’s Dancing on My Grave (1986) and Broadway, Balanchine, and Beyond by Bettijane Sills (2019). She looks at psychological studies of masochism and their relation to the art she loves.

Lovers of classical ballet who don’t want to see the sausage being made might do well to avoid Don’t Think, Dear. But I found myself feeling something

like gratitude: For maybe the first time ever, I was glad I had missed out on all ballet had to offer me.

Robb observes hopeful signs that this insular world may be spinning away from what one dancer in the book describes as a “very niche, very beautiful pain cult.” She finds a woman-led ballet company where respect is rule No. 1; a gorgeous “Swan Lake” performance that includes a gender-nonconforming dancer who is cast in both male and female roles; and dancers wearing masks onstage during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, “a radical acknowledgment that there is something — health of the individual, and of the group — more important than aesthetic perfection,” she says.

Still, Robb acknowledges that her complex feelings about ballet may always be with her. “Though you move on you don’t ever completely get over it,” she quotes novelist and former dancer Sigrid Nunez saying. “That loss is part of your life and who you are forever.”

Kimberly Schaye is a co-author of Stronger Than Dirt: How One Urban Couple Grew a Business, a Family, and a New Way of Life From the Ground Up.