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Frozen Teardrop: The Tragedy and Triumph of Figure Skating's "Queen of Spin"
Frozen Teardrop is the autobiographical account of one of the most beloved and controversial personalities in the history of figure skating. In this straight-forward memoir, Lucinda Ruh takes her readers through the harsh and painful realities of the figure-skating world while exposing the never-before-released details of her own private pain and suffering which would ultimately turn this Guinness-listed international icon into a bed-ridden, suicidal, starved, agoraphobic and terrified young woman. "Frozen Teardrop" is a true-life tale of beauty, refinement, genius, and skill contrasted against the cut-throat starkness of world figure-skating competition in its bleakest, most tortuous, most mind-warping moments--as seen through the eyes of a developing young prodigy whose personal life would harbor its own menagerie of horrors, secrets, and personal violations.
243 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 1, 2012
Oh dear, Lucinda Ruh is a terribly earnest young woman. Given her life history, which consists chiefly of an overextended and destructively co-dependent relationship with a true horror of a skate-mother, resulting in serious deterioration of both her physical and mental health, you can understand why she hasn't yet found the power to laugh at herself. And I'm truly glad for her sake that she's in a better place, and obviously set on the road to actual maturity. But still, this autobiography was a painful read, not just for the record of abuse and poor coaching decisions, but because it's apparent that Lucinda is still only part-way out of the woods. Her extensive philosophical reflections are still naive and entirely self-obsessed, and her constant recurrence to the theme of her own high performance are disturbing not because they reflect too high an opinion of her innate talents (which they do) but because they are so obviously the product of massive and ingrained insecurity. Her decision to withhold the names of everybody she talks about (despite the fact that most of them are extremely obvious or easily determined with a little googling) is clearly not a legal one, nor a real desire to conceal identity, but simply a desire not to give direct offence.
That said, Lucinda *is* talented, both in her skating (which was always extremely musical, as well as having the 'hook' of those amazing - and physically destructive - spins), and in her general intelligence and sensitivity. And she certainly had a broad range of experience of the skating world; her description of the pitiful training conditions at Harbun (not a surprise, but certainly the most vividly detailed picture I've read) was worth the price of the book right there, as was her chapter on her abortive training relationship with the ineffable Toller. Indeed, reading that in conjunction with Toller's corresponding chapter in "Ice Cream" was enough to make me laugh out loud. Talk about two worlds that never connected!
I could have wished that Lucinda's obliteration of names had not obliterated also a more direct acknowledgment of the people who *did* treat her well, or whom she admired greatly (Kurt Browning in the first category and Katia Gordeeva in the second, for instance). Nonetheless, I honour her for her attempt to move into a more healthy life, and as for her still propitiatory attitude towards her abusive mother - well, a stranger can sigh, but we all do what we have to to preserve the most important relationships in our lives.
I wish her well, and I thank her for the pleasure and little thrills she gave me with her skating.
That said, Lucinda *is* talented, both in her skating (which was always extremely musical, as well as having the 'hook' of those amazing - and physically destructive - spins), and in her general intelligence and sensitivity. And she certainly had a broad range of experience of the skating world; her description of the pitiful training conditions at Harbun (not a surprise, but certainly the most vividly detailed picture I've read) was worth the price of the book right there, as was her chapter on her abortive training relationship with the ineffable Toller. Indeed, reading that in conjunction with Toller's corresponding chapter in "Ice Cream" was enough to make me laugh out loud. Talk about two worlds that never connected!
I could have wished that Lucinda's obliteration of names had not obliterated also a more direct acknowledgment of the people who *did* treat her well, or whom she admired greatly (Kurt Browning in the first category and Katia Gordeeva in the second, for instance). Nonetheless, I honour her for her attempt to move into a more healthy life, and as for her still propitiatory attitude towards her abusive mother - well, a stranger can sigh, but we all do what we have to to preserve the most important relationships in our lives.
I wish her well, and I thank her for the pleasure and little thrills she gave me with her skating.
May 31, 2023
Reading this was a weird experience.
First, this book needed, at the very least, a basic copyediting, as many commas are missing and Lucinda occasionally phrases things in a confusing way. There are a lot of places where she repeats herself, sometimes on the same page or even in the same paragraph. It also could have used a structural editor to help organize some sections in a way that flowed better and maybe cut out some of the bad amateur philosophizing, like the paragraphs I skimmed at the beginning where she does an awful lot of telling you about how she is going to tell you her life story in a super special way.
She also made the bizarre decision not to name anyone outside of her family because the book isn't meant to be about them. This reasoning does not make much sense, and in addition, all of her coaches are listed on Wikipedia, while the others mentioned are internationally competitive skaters, and she makes it bleedingly obvious who she means each time. Why can't she say she liked Gordeeva, who she has been open about admiring, instead of the woman half of the Olympic gold medalist pair team when she was nine? If she wants to talk about how poorly Cranston treated her, perhaps she could have the confidence to use his name instead of referring to a Canadian coach known for his artistry who really really liked painting and had a house in Mexico. And if the book is not about the people who go unnamed, maybe she could have left out the story of how she saw another skater self-harming from stress, after qualifying that she's talking about a female singles Swiss champion somewhat older than her known for her innovative and fast spins (pretty clearly Krieg).
Anyway, I wasn't sure I was going to finish the book at first, because Lucinda comes off as really annoying for much of the first third or so. She seems to be amazing at everything she does - her family is obviously very rich, she's super fashionable, she refuses to cheat on runs like the other skaters but beats them to the finish line every single time (but still never got appreciated by the coaches, the poor girl!), she gets amazing grades and wins awards and leads in every school play and wins every fitness test and graduates early, and the Japanese federation just loved her so much that they invited her specially to domestic competitions because she was always the most artistic and most spinny.
Lucinda clearly wants to be seen as humble, but then she talks herself up all the time. She's the most popular with fans, she's all over the TV, she's the star of every show; at least she doesn't pretend everyone else loved her (she's actually quite straightforward about not having been very social with other skaters). Even the early mentions that her family was unhappy don't do much to combat this impression, perhaps because they're mostly quick asides. At the same time, she also comes off as strangely helpless in the earlier chapters, like saying that when she was eight she couldn't even put on her skates by herself, and that when she had to go to a summer camp for a week, she spent hours every day curled up crying on the phone to her parents.
In addition, a couple of her claims come off as strange. For example, she says multiple times that she didn't go through puberty at all until she was in her mid-twenties and was completely flat-chested even at nineteen. Look, I wouldn't be surprised if she grew more after she quit skating - that happens with some athletes, especially those in aesthetic sports. I can believe her when she says her height wasn't an issue during her career, as people sometimes mention, and that she didn't finish going through puberty until she quit. But you can clearly see she has started developing curves in videos of her skating as a teenager, so her repeating that she didn't is just odd.
She also states that the Swiss fed made sure she placed second at Nationals 'almost every year', sent their preferred winner to Euros, and then called her up to do Worlds when their chosen champion failed to do well at Euros. I believe her in general that this happened - you can clearly see in her results that they kept sending her to Worlds instead of the national champion in years outside of the one she won - but she was only second at Nats twice, so there seems to be some exaggeration happening. The year when she was national champion barely warrants a mention.
Somewhere around a third of the way through, things started to get weird, which is when the book started to become more compelling. She swerves from talking about how her absolutely amazing in every way mother who she has been praising over and over again also physically beat her all the time. Lucinda sprinkles paragraphs of describing her terror, and how her mom wrested her out of bed in the middle of the night to do a run or wouldn't let her off the ice if she wasn't happy and so on - vividly written and painful to read, despite the grammar issues - with justifications about how it wasn't really her mom's fault because she was just so stressed out.
As an outsider to her life, it made me think that she needed some time away from her family and perhaps therapy, because what she wrote never gave me the feeling that she had come to terms with how terribly she was treated. After she first describes the abuse, she goes back to talking about how amaaaaaazing her parents were, has she told you they were the best possible parents enough times yet, before the abuse comes up again, and she says she was afraid to get off the ice when she was in incredible pain because her mom would be angry. In a later chapter, she describes being beaten for two hours while on a train and feeling like she would die, but defends her mom as being rightfully set off and not to blame. At an even later point, there's one paragraph of praising her mom for going through a lot to drive her everywhere when Lucinda was so weak and underweight she could barely get out of bed, followed by her mom beating her when told she wanted to stop skating, followed by more justifications and praise for her mother.
It was emotional whiplash, and also infuriating to read on Lucinda's behalf. Her dad was mostly absent for much of her life due to work, but she says that he didn't believe her about being beaten and, along with her mom, believed a single doctor's word that her pain was all in her head when she had a physically obvious injury that could have left her paralyzed. I just felt really sorry and sad for her.
She and her mother come across as overly dependent on each other, and Lucinda only spent a small amount of time living independently before her health forced her back to her parents. Her mom wrote the afterword, but honestly, I could barely read it after everything Lucinda said about her; she kind of tries to take some responsibility and admits that maybe she shouldn't have forced Lucinda to try to be perfect. I felt like Lucinda was still very tangled up with her mom in a lot of ways and hadn't fully processed everything that had happened in her life when she wrote this.
Outside of her family, there is so much upsetting physical and emotional abuse going on from coaches towards the skaters. When the coaches aren't being abusive, they come across as ridiculous, like demanding that seven-year-old Lucinda needs to prove her devotion to skating by training for hours every day by herself for months (Nobuo Sato), or not showing up to the rink half the time (Cranston, and she also said he wanted her to do a free program with all the jumps in the last minute? Yeesh). Lucinda also starts to explicitly state at some point that she was being overtrained and had a terrible do-not-rest mindset drilled into her, instead of just rolling out her daily schedule as a child and letting you notice that it has only six hours of sleep in it.
She said that she was in pain every time she skated since she was only 11, and she's very clear that the enormous amounts of physical exercise she and her coaches put her through and pushing through injuries - even being accused of faking pain - were really really bad for her. Lucinda also mentions that she repeatedly hit her head on the ice and paid it no mind, and sometimes fainted in the middle of spins. Somehow she managed to push herself to skate in shows through a spinal fracture and an increasingly terrible illness that she couldn't get diagnosed.
A lot of the later part of book deals with her cratering health in painful detail - it gets hard to read at parts; I can't imagine how on Earth she had any kind of life with all that going on, let alone kept skating in shows. Spoiler alert: on the verge of giving up, they found a doctor who told them that she had been spinning so hard and so much that it gave her mini-concussions, screwing up all kinds of areas of her brain. Which sort of makes sense, at least to someone who is not a doctor... but this doctor also treated her concussed brain with chiropracty and homeopathy, both of which are fake medicine, so I have to say, I wonder about his diagnostic abilities. He did seem to be the one doctor who finally, finally managed to persuade her to stop and give her body the rest it desperately needed.
There were also good parts that weren't so depressing! It was interesting to read about her variety of training environments, since she trained in quite different countries (Japan, Canada, US, China, Switzerland briefly) and in extremely different situations. For instance, the Chinese training center was a bare dorm in a rural area, and they got one kettle of hot water a day. This was the first coach she liked and who appears to have treated her kindly for the most part (except for wanting her to lose weight when she was so thin she still had not experienced menses), so it was nice to read about her being a little happier, even if at the same time she kept getting sick with no real access to medical care.
Later, after she was forced to change coaches, she went to a summer camp where she was supposed to train with her Chinese coach again - but he had been told on the plane trip over that it was not allowed. Instead of giving up, they decided to play espionage! Secret coaching! Hand signals! Taking different paths to meet up in the woods! This part was hilarious and fun to read. Is there any drama like skating drama?
She also has a great-yet-terrifying story from her show days - they were doing a show in the Caribbean, and the pipes under the rink kept bursting and making mini-fountains on the ice. But they didn't have time to re-do the rink, and the organizers refused to cancel the show, so they... just skated around the mini-fountains. And to mark them, they put potted plants over top of them! Which they could barely see under the spotlight! On the one hand, it's a miracle nobody hurt themselves - on the other, the mental image of all these skaters hopping over an increasing number of potted plants as the days went by is amazing.
And while most of the skating and ice metaphors were pretty forced, this one was good and relatable:
"It was like when my skating coach used to say, 'Do it just one more, one last time.' But that one more time was never just one more time. It was again and again and again."
Overall... as Lucinda admits at the beginning, this isn't really a book about skating. She goes into some detail about a few of her performances, but skips over a lot; for all she talks about spins, she says very little about the actual spins. It's mostly the memoir of someone who spent two decades in an extremely abusive athletic career and doesn't seem to have completely found her distance from it yet.
First, this book needed, at the very least, a basic copyediting, as many commas are missing and Lucinda occasionally phrases things in a confusing way. There are a lot of places where she repeats herself, sometimes on the same page or even in the same paragraph. It also could have used a structural editor to help organize some sections in a way that flowed better and maybe cut out some of the bad amateur philosophizing, like the paragraphs I skimmed at the beginning where she does an awful lot of telling you about how she is going to tell you her life story in a super special way.
She also made the bizarre decision not to name anyone outside of her family because the book isn't meant to be about them. This reasoning does not make much sense, and in addition, all of her coaches are listed on Wikipedia, while the others mentioned are internationally competitive skaters, and she makes it bleedingly obvious who she means each time. Why can't she say she liked Gordeeva, who she has been open about admiring, instead of the woman half of the Olympic gold medalist pair team when she was nine? If she wants to talk about how poorly Cranston treated her, perhaps she could have the confidence to use his name instead of referring to a Canadian coach known for his artistry who really really liked painting and had a house in Mexico. And if the book is not about the people who go unnamed, maybe she could have left out the story of how she saw another skater self-harming from stress, after qualifying that she's talking about a female singles Swiss champion somewhat older than her known for her innovative and fast spins (pretty clearly Krieg).
Anyway, I wasn't sure I was going to finish the book at first, because Lucinda comes off as really annoying for much of the first third or so. She seems to be amazing at everything she does - her family is obviously very rich, she's super fashionable, she refuses to cheat on runs like the other skaters but beats them to the finish line every single time (but still never got appreciated by the coaches, the poor girl!), she gets amazing grades and wins awards and leads in every school play and wins every fitness test and graduates early, and the Japanese federation just loved her so much that they invited her specially to domestic competitions because she was always the most artistic and most spinny.
Lucinda clearly wants to be seen as humble, but then she talks herself up all the time. She's the most popular with fans, she's all over the TV, she's the star of every show; at least she doesn't pretend everyone else loved her (she's actually quite straightforward about not having been very social with other skaters). Even the early mentions that her family was unhappy don't do much to combat this impression, perhaps because they're mostly quick asides. At the same time, she also comes off as strangely helpless in the earlier chapters, like saying that when she was eight she couldn't even put on her skates by herself, and that when she had to go to a summer camp for a week, she spent hours every day curled up crying on the phone to her parents.
In addition, a couple of her claims come off as strange. For example, she says multiple times that she didn't go through puberty at all until she was in her mid-twenties and was completely flat-chested even at nineteen. Look, I wouldn't be surprised if she grew more after she quit skating - that happens with some athletes, especially those in aesthetic sports. I can believe her when she says her height wasn't an issue during her career, as people sometimes mention, and that she didn't finish going through puberty until she quit. But you can clearly see she has started developing curves in videos of her skating as a teenager, so her repeating that she didn't is just odd.
She also states that the Swiss fed made sure she placed second at Nationals 'almost every year', sent their preferred winner to Euros, and then called her up to do Worlds when their chosen champion failed to do well at Euros. I believe her in general that this happened - you can clearly see in her results that they kept sending her to Worlds instead of the national champion in years outside of the one she won - but she was only second at Nats twice, so there seems to be some exaggeration happening. The year when she was national champion barely warrants a mention.
Somewhere around a third of the way through, things started to get weird, which is when the book started to become more compelling. She swerves from talking about how her absolutely amazing in every way mother who she has been praising over and over again also physically beat her all the time. Lucinda sprinkles paragraphs of describing her terror, and how her mom wrested her out of bed in the middle of the night to do a run or wouldn't let her off the ice if she wasn't happy and so on - vividly written and painful to read, despite the grammar issues - with justifications about how it wasn't really her mom's fault because she was just so stressed out.
As an outsider to her life, it made me think that she needed some time away from her family and perhaps therapy, because what she wrote never gave me the feeling that she had come to terms with how terribly she was treated. After she first describes the abuse, she goes back to talking about how amaaaaaazing her parents were, has she told you they were the best possible parents enough times yet, before the abuse comes up again, and she says she was afraid to get off the ice when she was in incredible pain because her mom would be angry. In a later chapter, she describes being beaten for two hours while on a train and feeling like she would die, but defends her mom as being rightfully set off and not to blame. At an even later point, there's one paragraph of praising her mom for going through a lot to drive her everywhere when Lucinda was so weak and underweight she could barely get out of bed, followed by her mom beating her when told she wanted to stop skating, followed by more justifications and praise for her mother.
It was emotional whiplash, and also infuriating to read on Lucinda's behalf. Her dad was mostly absent for much of her life due to work, but she says that he didn't believe her about being beaten and, along with her mom, believed a single doctor's word that her pain was all in her head when she had a physically obvious injury that could have left her paralyzed. I just felt really sorry and sad for her.
She and her mother come across as overly dependent on each other, and Lucinda only spent a small amount of time living independently before her health forced her back to her parents. Her mom wrote the afterword, but honestly, I could barely read it after everything Lucinda said about her; she kind of tries to take some responsibility and admits that maybe she shouldn't have forced Lucinda to try to be perfect. I felt like Lucinda was still very tangled up with her mom in a lot of ways and hadn't fully processed everything that had happened in her life when she wrote this.
Outside of her family, there is so much upsetting physical and emotional abuse going on from coaches towards the skaters. When the coaches aren't being abusive, they come across as ridiculous, like demanding that seven-year-old Lucinda needs to prove her devotion to skating by training for hours every day by herself for months (Nobuo Sato), or not showing up to the rink half the time (Cranston, and she also said he wanted her to do a free program with all the jumps in the last minute? Yeesh). Lucinda also starts to explicitly state at some point that she was being overtrained and had a terrible do-not-rest mindset drilled into her, instead of just rolling out her daily schedule as a child and letting you notice that it has only six hours of sleep in it.
She said that she was in pain every time she skated since she was only 11, and she's very clear that the enormous amounts of physical exercise she and her coaches put her through and pushing through injuries - even being accused of faking pain - were really really bad for her. Lucinda also mentions that she repeatedly hit her head on the ice and paid it no mind, and sometimes fainted in the middle of spins. Somehow she managed to push herself to skate in shows through a spinal fracture and an increasingly terrible illness that she couldn't get diagnosed.
A lot of the later part of book deals with her cratering health in painful detail - it gets hard to read at parts; I can't imagine how on Earth she had any kind of life with all that going on, let alone kept skating in shows. Spoiler alert: on the verge of giving up, they found a doctor who told them that she had been spinning so hard and so much that it gave her mini-concussions, screwing up all kinds of areas of her brain. Which sort of makes sense, at least to someone who is not a doctor... but this doctor also treated her concussed brain with chiropracty and homeopathy, both of which are fake medicine, so I have to say, I wonder about his diagnostic abilities. He did seem to be the one doctor who finally, finally managed to persuade her to stop and give her body the rest it desperately needed.
There were also good parts that weren't so depressing! It was interesting to read about her variety of training environments, since she trained in quite different countries (Japan, Canada, US, China, Switzerland briefly) and in extremely different situations. For instance, the Chinese training center was a bare dorm in a rural area, and they got one kettle of hot water a day. This was the first coach she liked and who appears to have treated her kindly for the most part (except for wanting her to lose weight when she was so thin she still had not experienced menses), so it was nice to read about her being a little happier, even if at the same time she kept getting sick with no real access to medical care.
Later, after she was forced to change coaches, she went to a summer camp where she was supposed to train with her Chinese coach again - but he had been told on the plane trip over that it was not allowed. Instead of giving up, they decided to play espionage! Secret coaching! Hand signals! Taking different paths to meet up in the woods! This part was hilarious and fun to read. Is there any drama like skating drama?
She also has a great-yet-terrifying story from her show days - they were doing a show in the Caribbean, and the pipes under the rink kept bursting and making mini-fountains on the ice. But they didn't have time to re-do the rink, and the organizers refused to cancel the show, so they... just skated around the mini-fountains. And to mark them, they put potted plants over top of them! Which they could barely see under the spotlight! On the one hand, it's a miracle nobody hurt themselves - on the other, the mental image of all these skaters hopping over an increasing number of potted plants as the days went by is amazing.
And while most of the skating and ice metaphors were pretty forced, this one was good and relatable:
"It was like when my skating coach used to say, 'Do it just one more, one last time.' But that one more time was never just one more time. It was again and again and again."
Overall... as Lucinda admits at the beginning, this isn't really a book about skating. She goes into some detail about a few of her performances, but skips over a lot; for all she talks about spins, she says very little about the actual spins. It's mostly the memoir of someone who spent two decades in an extremely abusive athletic career and doesn't seem to have completely found her distance from it yet.
March 4, 2013
This has one of the best stories in it that I've ever read; both interesting, intriguing, and compelling. However, it is also one of the worst written memoirs that I have ever read because it is filled with a sense of lingering conflict about how she truly feels about some of the people in her life. There is a continuous lack of clear feeling. That being said, if you can handle some chunks of woe-is-me, her story is worth reading, especially if you are interested in figure skating.
September 20, 2025
Lucinda Martha Ruh was born in Switzerland in 1979. Ruh was both a ballet dancer and a skater, beginning to skate in 1984. She was able to train with some talented coaches, and began doing very well in competitions. She eventually made quite the name for herself for her spins, winning world titles. While this book does discuss some of her wonderful career, it talks a lot about the struggles she faced as a human being outside of the sport. She did obtain several injuries from both falls and wear and tear on her body. The injuries got her down physically and mentally. Her interpersonal relationships got her down physically and mentally. She speaks openly and honestly about her experiences, which I appreciated.
A couple of really cool things about her legacy that I learned were that she created over twenty new spins that became standard requirements in competitions and that she went on to coach and be a spin specialist. In 2003, she set a world record for most continuous revolutions, which was really amazing. I appreciated the candidness of this memoir and the insight into the world of skating and the struggles behind the scenes.
A couple of really cool things about her legacy that I learned were that she created over twenty new spins that became standard requirements in competitions and that she went on to coach and be a spin specialist. In 2003, she set a world record for most continuous revolutions, which was really amazing. I appreciated the candidness of this memoir and the insight into the world of skating and the struggles behind the scenes.
January 28, 2023
I love honest recounts like this. I admired and sympathized with Lucinda. Things are not ideal in the world of figure skating and it must have taken great courage to share this experience in a book. I feel glad this book is out
August 17, 2021
Oof. I feel a little bad giving this a lousy rating, because Ruh comes off so naïve here. Her focus on skating began at age eight, when her parents told her that she had to decide between skating, dance, cello, and piano—not because doing all of them took up too much time, et cetera, but so that she could go hard at one of them. She picked skating.
Ruh says early on that she didn't want to make the book 'about' skating, and as such, there's very little detail about her routines, what the skating part of her practices entailed, and so on. I understand why she wanted to focus on the things around the skating rather than the skating itself (there's so much emotional mess to cover), but I do wish there'd been a bit more. A ghostwriter might have helped (Ruh's training of course is in skating rather than writing, and the result feels both tell-y and overwrought). Ruh is best known for her spinning ability and apparently developed a number of spins that are now used by many skaters—and she talks about loving spinning, about living to spin—but I don't know what any of those spins look like, or what it felt while she was spinning, or why she loved spinning so much, or when she developed that love of it.
Instead, oh gosh. It sounds like skating stopped being fun for Ruh at a very young age—perhaps as soon as her parents started pushing her to excel. More than that, it sounds like the entire environment surrounding her was toxic and that she's still figuring out what that means: the whole book reads a little like my parents are the most wonderful people ever and gave up everything to support me! The coaches in Japan hit their students, but I was exempt because I was a foreigner. Oh, but my coach had my mother beat me instead, and she kept beating me for years whenever I didn't perform the way she thought I should have. It was all my fault. Wasn't she wonderful? I'm so grateful to everyone who's ever hurt me because it allowed me to grow so much.
I highlighted a lot throughout but find myself reluctant to quote heavily, because it feels so much like the dysfunction hasn't quite ended. Ruh ended up with serious and long-lasting physical and perhaps emotional problems from overtraining, malnutrition, and lack of medical care (she/her parents/her coaches didn't want to acknowledge injuries or other issues), but she pretty much absolves her mother of everything. Her mother writes the afterword, in fact, and more or less says 'yeah, I prooooobably should have done a few things differently'. Ruh actually low-key blames her older sister (who has virtually no role in the book) because her sister was involved in ice skating before Ruh was. There's a lot at the end of the book that hasn't really been unpacked, and the whole thing just ends up feeling terribly sad.
Ruh says early on that she didn't want to make the book 'about' skating, and as such, there's very little detail about her routines, what the skating part of her practices entailed, and so on. I understand why she wanted to focus on the things around the skating rather than the skating itself (there's so much emotional mess to cover), but I do wish there'd been a bit more. A ghostwriter might have helped (Ruh's training of course is in skating rather than writing, and the result feels both tell-y and overwrought). Ruh is best known for her spinning ability and apparently developed a number of spins that are now used by many skaters—and she talks about loving spinning, about living to spin—but I don't know what any of those spins look like, or what it felt while she was spinning, or why she loved spinning so much, or when she developed that love of it.
Instead, oh gosh. It sounds like skating stopped being fun for Ruh at a very young age—perhaps as soon as her parents started pushing her to excel. More than that, it sounds like the entire environment surrounding her was toxic and that she's still figuring out what that means: the whole book reads a little like my parents are the most wonderful people ever and gave up everything to support me! The coaches in Japan hit their students, but I was exempt because I was a foreigner. Oh, but my coach had my mother beat me instead, and she kept beating me for years whenever I didn't perform the way she thought I should have. It was all my fault. Wasn't she wonderful? I'm so grateful to everyone who's ever hurt me because it allowed me to grow so much.
I highlighted a lot throughout but find myself reluctant to quote heavily, because it feels so much like the dysfunction hasn't quite ended. Ruh ended up with serious and long-lasting physical and perhaps emotional problems from overtraining, malnutrition, and lack of medical care (she/her parents/her coaches didn't want to acknowledge injuries or other issues), but she pretty much absolves her mother of everything. Her mother writes the afterword, in fact, and more or less says 'yeah, I prooooobably should have done a few things differently'. Ruh actually low-key blames her older sister (who has virtually no role in the book) because her sister was involved in ice skating before Ruh was. There's a lot at the end of the book that hasn't really been unpacked, and the whole thing just ends up feeling terribly sad.
November 2, 2014
The story is horrifying yet honest, adventurous yet sheltered. I know Lucinda and find her humble, unspoiled by her experiences and generally very kind. I never would have dreamed this had been her life. Nor would I have pegged her mother as the type she is portrayed as. The book was an eye opener.
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