Emma J Stephens

This was an Early Reviewers book that I've read twice in order to write this review, to try to clarify my feelings. I didn't necessarily find it easy or gripping to read, but it did make me think, and I was overall glad I'd read it. Emma and her sister Sadie are born into a family who struggle with alcoholism. Feeling abandoned by their mother, and forced to be more adult than she should be because of her father's immaturity, Emma gets caught up in and inadvertently perpetuates a cycle of hurt that has far-reaching consequences. This memoir is presented in vignette format, and this both worked and didn't work for me. In some ways it heightened my perception that had things gone differently at any stage, Emma's life could have also gone so differently, making this quite a thought provoking and poignant story. I felt both admiration for Emma's achievements, and sadness that she wasn't able to get more of the love and support and nurturing she deserved.… (mehr)

Putting the ‘functional’ back into a dysfunctional life

If ever there was a testament to seizing every experience presented, good, bad and in between, I think Emma Stephens’ For a Dancer: The Memoir is it. While many reviewers have complained that this is nothing but a jumbled succession of overdramatized events in the life of a dysfunctional family, and one individual within it, I saw a far different picture. Certainly, the author made some questionable choices through her life, but these are presented in the book in a painfully honest and bitterly open way, and always examined and presented under the light of ‘hindsight’ as one would expect with a set of memoirs. At times the book perhaps suffers from an underlying self-cynicism, and at others left me slapping my head in a kind of how could she have been so stupid kind of way, but on the whole I found the book engaging and easy to read – and very evocative of the locations in which events take place.

I must commend Ms Stephens on her excellent depiction of the cultural dislocation one suffers when moving to a country not one’s own, where the language spoken is unfamiliar and so even being able to do the simplest daily tasks that we all too often take for granted becomes like climbing the North Face of an unattainable mountain. Having recently spent some time working in Cairo (I'm from the UK), this particularly struck a chord with me. It is chapters such as this – when the content speaks to the personal experiences of the reader – that help to improve the book’s accessibility and engagement with the intended audience.

Painfully honest, all too human, all too recognizable, the events written of in For a Dancer: The Memoir present the journey of a strong individual struggling to, and succeeding in, making lemonade where life has dealt her a whole crate load of lemons.… (mehr)