If You Say So

Michelle Herman took her first-ever ballet class at the age of 62, and it changed her life. If You Say So is a book of true stories about loss and reinvention, longing and loneliness, friendship and community, and family and home-and dance, the dedicated practice of which has led her on an unexpected new path. This is a book about grief and the way it lives in the body-and joy, and the way it lives in the body too.

From the making of a pandemic-era dance film-the dancers masked, outdoors, six feet apart-to the sudden, shocking loss of a friend and fellow (sister) dancer three years later; from the challenges and delights of making art to the challenges and delights of motherhood and daughterhood, this book is a love letter to Herman's life as she enters her seventh decade, and to everyone and everything, human and nonhuman both, who's filled her life with their love.