Review: "Behind the Red Velvet Curtain" by Joy Womack, as told by Elizabeth Shockman

Behind the Red Velvet Curtain by Joy Womack, as told by Elizabeth Shockman
Published March 2025 via Rowman & Littlefield
★★★

I had no idea what I was getting into. What fifteen-year-old ever knows anything about what their decisions mean, what future disasters they're signing themselves up for? I was too busy thinking about how this felt like the beginning of a fairy tale. (loc. 350*)

In 2009, when Womack was fifteen, she took a leap: she moved across an ocean to Russia to train at the Bolshoi Ballet Academy, the affiliate (and feeder) school of the Bolshoi Ballet and a world away from what Womack knew in the States, not least—but also not only—because she had left her family behind and didn't speak Russian. Already, though, she had a dream: to not just graduate from the Bolshoi Ballet Academy but to be accepted by the Bolshoi Ballet itself. And she was, eventually...but of course it wasn't exactly that simple.

Womack got a fair amount of press as a dance student and later Bolshoi dancer because, although she was not the only American to study ballet in Russia, the numbers are low, and for an undetermined reason Womack was placed not in the program for foreigners but in the standard Russian track. (Her teacher's verdict: she could stay, but only if she learned Russian.) And the book is unique just for the scenario: I've read my fair share of ballet memoirs (and then some), but they've almost all been by people studying and then working in the West; a large part of this book is shadowed by the culture shock of moving across the world, alone, at a young age, and a further part is shadowed by the culture shock of moving back.

I don't know much (and by much I mean anything) about Womack as a dancer, but it's impossible not to feel her sheer ambition here, the determination to make it to the top, whatever that means—and perhaps (though I might be extrapolating too much here) to make the move and the training and all the attendant challenges worth it.

There are some surprising intersections of some of my more specific reading interests here, including that Womack grew up in what sounds like a hyperconservative church; at one point she references umbrellas of authority, which is something I mostly hear about in the context of the IBLP (think the Duggar family). I wished she had gone into some more detail, especially when she says things like this:

I learned a way of thinking at [the church] that felt like fitting fastened wheels into an iron rail. [...] Critical thinking skills were not necessary to keep moving on this sort of track. Neither was compassion or questioning. Questioning, in fact, was something that could get you in trouble. It was wrong and an affront. Good kids, faithful kids, patriotic kids, kids who were going somewhere didn't ask questions.

This was a rail that helped me fit in at all sorts of ballet companies, as it turned out. It helped me fit in in Russia. (loc. 250)

That's fascinating to me, and it makes a ton of sense, but gosh I would have liked it explored further—I was hoping to come to a point in the book where she started realizing how the one experience fed into the other, but instead she remains largely uncritical of that aspect of ballet in Russia. (Not about everything: She and her husband were out of the country when Russia invaded Ukraine, and she writes that they intentionally have not been back since.) In general I think I could have used some more connections between...experience and emotion, I guess, and perhaps some more interrogation of her own reactions to various events (e.g., much of what happened in Boston).

Not a standout as far as writing goes, but I'm glad Womack worked with a ghostwriter (or cowriter) on this—I genuinely appreciate it when memoir writers know that it will be helpful to work with a trained writer. This will probably be most interesting to ballet enthusiasts, but there's plenty of complication for more general memoir readers.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.