Every four years, the Winter Olympics rolls around and, like clockwork, I become temporarily obsessed with figure skating. This time, however, I’ve found my obsession sticking around a little longer, so I decided to reread Tillie Walden’s graphic novel Spinning, a memoir that explores the author’s years as a competitive figure skater and her decision to quit the sport as a teenager. Tillie Walden is one of my favorite graphic novelists, with works that range from science fiction and fantasy to nonfiction, and Spinning is an honest and melancholic exploration of what it means to fall out of love with a sport you’ve devoted years of your life to.
Following Tillie Walden from age twelve to age seventeen, Spinning opens as her family moves from New Jersey to Texas and finds herself trying to acclimate to a new school, new home, new figure skating coach, and new synchronized skating team all at once. While she’s been devoted to the sport since a young age and is familiar with the struggles of the environment, from harshly critical coaches to the stress of competitions, her passion for the sport fades away and she’s left merely going through the motions. She’s a talented skater, but nowhere near Olympic-level, and as Tillie grows older she’s forced to question if figure skating holds a place in her future.
A lot of sports stories are underdog stories–about a devoted but overlooked athlete facing the odds and triumphing despite them. Spinning is a different story, and one much less uplifting, but still worthwhile and emotionally evocative. Tillie Walden’s portrayal of the world of figure skating comes from an insider’s POV, someone who spent early mornings at practice and weekends at competitions, and she turns a critical eye to the sport, from the strict feminine expectations placed on the skaters’s appearances to the constant cost of equipment, travel, and ice time. She portrays figure skating not as just sparkly outfits and grace, but also a sport that requires intense physical prowess and mental calculation. While she earns praise from her coach and a coveted spot on a synchronized skating team, Tillie comes to realize that, for her, the sport is isolating and exhausting, the thrill of success no longer enough to outweigh the stress and fatigue.
Off the ice, Tillie’s adolescence has other struggles that exacerbate her disillusionment with skating. As she tries to find her place on a new skating team where friendships and histories have already been forged, she also faces relentless bullying at school. As she grows uncomfortable with the heavily enforced standards of femininity that skaters must conform to, she falls for her first girlfriend and is forced to face the inescapable homophobia of her environment. And as Tillie finds herself facing down the next steps of her life after high school, she begins to wonder if figure skating has a place in it. While her life as a skater has required intense devotion and countless hours, sometimes habit isn’t enough on its own.
Walden’s art is perfectly complimentary to the story of Spinning. Illustrated in purple ink so dark it’s nearly black and the occasional highlight of yellow, the color palette and clean lines fits both the melancholy tone of the story and the visuals of vast white rinks and the meticulous routines performed on them. When Tillie stands alone on the ice in front of a panel of judges, the white expanse all around her emphasizes the inescapable scrutiny, and the heavy predawn darkness that accompanies her 4AM wakeup for practice practically made me feel her early-morning exhaustion. In between chapters, guides explain different technical moves in figure skating for those who might not know what a twizzle or a flip jump is.
Walden says in her afterword for Spinning that she’s the kind of creator who is happy to make a book without having all the answers, that she wants her book to be open to the reader’s proscription and speculation rather than forcing her intentions to the front, but that doesn’t mean that Spinning isn’t an emotionally rich and complex story. It’s a bittersweet story about falling out of love with a sport, falling in love with another girl for the first time, and coming to terms with the fact that growing and changing can mean leaving behind the world you used to know.
Content warnings: depictions of homophobia, sexual harassment/attempted sexual assault, bullying, depression, and car crashes
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