For A Dancer The Memoir eBook Emma J Stephens
Download As PDF : For A Dancer The Memoir eBook Emma J Stephens 
Brought up in an environment riddled with substance abuse and neglect, Emma has big dreams and little chance of ever reaching them. By the age of fourteen she is on her own, determined to escape the mentality that has crippled her family, but to succeed would mean leaving behind her sister and betraying the only life she’s ever known. From the Virginia countryside to the streets of Paris, through teenage motherhood and higher education, share Emma’s tears and triumphs as she searches for acceptance in an exclusive world and finds love in the most unlikely of places.
For A Dancer The Memoir eBook Emma J Stephens
It's quite possible that Emma Stephens has written one of the most courageous and honest books that I have ever read. Generally, I steer clear of memoirs as they tend to brim with the ego of celebrity. Having read the lengthy "Confessions" of JJ Rouseau, for example, he is clearly an egoist. But "For a Dancer" was written by a humble person simply and earnestly seeking a better life for herself and her son in a harsh universe. The author strikes me as a kind of pilgrim spirit like Aeneas wandering through an Underworld of dysfunctional people most for whom she cares but with radically limited means to save them or herself. Only a strong soul undertakes such a journey and then shares it with such candour. If this book were a novel, then the author could hide behind the artifice of the genre and claim so many of the most painful plot points of the story line were simply fictional. However, Stephens is fearless in her exposition and because of it she takes the higher ground of integrity and gains full credibility as a narrator despite the incredibly desperate bends of the road of her life's journey. There were times when her flawless literary style struck me as rather journalistic almost as if she lived outside herself and were seeing herself through the eyes of others. At other times the introspection is profound with a clarity devoid of self-pity during woefully hard times which she survived by her wits and resourcefulness. The demons whom she encounters are relentless and pursue her tirelessly. They are the demons that most of us encounter at some points in our lives primarily centering on broken relationships with family, friends and lovers. Clearly, Stephens is a woman with creative gifts and her narrative style read like a catharsis, almost as a pennance, for the choices that she has made which have brought her such heartbreak. She seeks merely a worthwhile and meaningful existence like all of us. Her journey takes her from extreme rural poverty in a hopelessly dysfunctional family in Virginia to Beverly Hills, the Rockies, Monaco and Oxford University in search of a meaningful vocation and a worthy partner. She is searching for a prince to save her and it turns out that her prince up to this point is her son, Gabriel, aptly named for she finds strength and even redemption in him. It is moving to witness such sacrifice at so high a cost and then to find as an unfolding and recurring epiphany that so much of the real meaning of life emerges from the love of a parent for a child. I was reminded in some of the Colorado passages of Lord Byron's prisoner of Chillon who dwells as a captive in a castle on Lake Geneva and befriends his chains in his communion with the unreachable freedom and beauty of the Swiss Alps just outside his confining cell. As Stephens approaches a midpoint in her life she anticipates that the high volatility of her prior life may moderate so that she may find tranquility, meaningful work and true love. Somewhere, perhaps, someone shall emerge who sees the pilgrim soul in her. Success is faithless master: in the spoils of success are sown every new defeat and from the ashes of defeat grow the seeds of every new victory. I respect the honesty and the courage in the worthy writing of this book and I hope that from the catharsis of its writing Stephens finds what really matters most to her. This book would make a great movie with her in the lead. Given the video playing in the heads of each of us about our life's journey, it is a reality that only seems a dream. "Who can tell the dancer from the dance?" Isn't that a penultimate question?Product details
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For A Dancer The Memoir eBook Emma J Stephens Reviews
Emma's story of her journey from a difficult and neglectful childhood through international adventures to deep, brutally honest inner work is thought-provoking and poignant. The author's willingness to bare her thoughts and emotions, even the ones which occasionally paint her in a less than flattering (but all too human) light, is refreshing and kept me glued to her story. I don't have much time to read - I MADE time to finish this book. I loved Emma's writing style and could relate to her struggles and confusion. This memoir is nothing less than an act of reclaiming a life. I would love to read a Part Two.
This is unlike any memoir I have ever read. For the first time it gives a shape to the chaotic lives of the Generation Xers now washed up on the shores of the Recession. Emma Stephens, now 33, looks back at her rollercoaster life for herself alone, and in the process creates an autobiography that opens for the reader the reality of young American lives today. Mark my words, Emma Stephens is a writer with a future, a distinctive new voice in literature, spare, stunningly honest, and unselfconsciously poetic. This book is to memoir what Bob Dylan was to music rough and tender, earthy and brilliant, completely original.
Tristine Rainer, Director, Center for Autobiographic Studies and author of The New Diary and Your Life as Story
Emma Stephens is an excellent writer which makes this book an enjoyable read and a page turner. If you are a fan of memoires especially those that teach life lessons through the sharing of life's experiences you will enjoy this book. While it is a tale of overcoming adversity it is much more a story of overcoming a sense of unworthiness. External obstacles, tough as they are, are easy to conquer - especially if you have a positive attitude - but finding success and contentment in life by overcoming an ingrained belief that you are not worthy is much more remarkable and inspiring.
This book will touch the reader with its diary like tale of a young girl, turned single mother growing up feeling unloved especially by her mother and substance abusing father, forced to live on the fringe of mainstream society, wanting desperately to belong, to be the recipient of kindness, to be recognized as having value and worth, to have someone to care enough to make her feel secure - to be part of a better family than the one she was born into. We follow her through her triumphs over desperate circumstances, her relationships with men who use and discard her and some whom she uses to survive, to her transformation into a highly educated, self reliant, empowered woman. It is better than a Cinderella story, because no prince rides in to rescue her; she does it on her own.
Like Dolly Parton born dirt poor and uneducated who crawled out of Pigeon Forge and Loretta Lyn the coal miner's daughter who had 4 children before she was 18, Emma Stephens emerges triumphant, not with the great financial success of Dolly and Loretta, but with a strong sense of self worth which all the money in the world cannot buy.
It's quite possible that Emma Stephens has written one of the most courageous and honest books that I have ever read. Generally, I steer clear of memoirs as they tend to brim with the ego of celebrity. Having read the lengthy "Confessions" of JJ Rouseau, for example, he is clearly an egoist. But "For a Dancer" was written by a humble person simply and earnestly seeking a better life for herself and her son in a harsh universe. The author strikes me as a kind of pilgrim spirit like Aeneas wandering through an Underworld of dysfunctional people most for whom she cares but with radically limited means to save them or herself. Only a strong soul undertakes such a journey and then shares it with such candour. If this book were a novel, then the author could hide behind the artifice of the genre and claim so many of the most painful plot points of the story line were simply fictional. However, Stephens is fearless in her exposition and because of it she takes the higher ground of integrity and gains full credibility as a narrator despite the incredibly desperate bends of the road of her life's journey. There were times when her flawless literary style struck me as rather journalistic almost as if she lived outside herself and were seeing herself through the eyes of others. At other times the introspection is profound with a clarity devoid of self-pity during woefully hard times which she survived by her wits and resourcefulness. The demons whom she encounters are relentless and pursue her tirelessly. They are the demons that most of us encounter at some points in our lives primarily centering on broken relationships with family, friends and lovers. Clearly, Stephens is a woman with creative gifts and her narrative style read like a catharsis, almost as a pennance, for the choices that she has made which have brought her such heartbreak. She seeks merely a worthwhile and meaningful existence like all of us. Her journey takes her from extreme rural poverty in a hopelessly dysfunctional family in Virginia to Beverly Hills, the Rockies, Monaco and Oxford University in search of a meaningful vocation and a worthy partner. She is searching for a prince to save her and it turns out that her prince up to this point is her son, Gabriel, aptly named for she finds strength and even redemption in him. It is moving to witness such sacrifice at so high a cost and then to find as an unfolding and recurring epiphany that so much of the real meaning of life emerges from the love of a parent for a child. I was reminded in some of the Colorado passages of Lord Byron's prisoner of Chillon who dwells as a captive in a castle on Lake Geneva and befriends his chains in his communion with the unreachable freedom and beauty of the Swiss Alps just outside his confining cell. As Stephens approaches a midpoint in her life she anticipates that the high volatility of her prior life may moderate so that she may find tranquility, meaningful work and true love. Somewhere, perhaps, someone shall emerge who sees the pilgrim soul in her. Success is faithless master in the spoils of success are sown every new defeat and from the ashes of defeat grow the seeds of every new victory. I respect the honesty and the courage in the worthy writing of this book and I hope that from the catharsis of its writing Stephens finds what really matters most to her. This book would make a great movie with her in the lead. Given the video playing in the heads of each of us about our life's journey, it is a reality that only seems a dream. "Who can tell the dancer from the dance?" Isn't that a penultimate question?
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