If You Say So

<p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>Michelle Herman took her first-ever ballet class at the age of 62 and it changed her life. </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0)>If You Say So</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> 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.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)>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.</span></p><p></p><h2>Praise for If You Say So</h2><p><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0)>If You Say So</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1)> is chock full of dances I've never attempted meals I've never cooked songs I've never sung and people I've never loved or grieved but Michelle Herman's beautiful writing reminds me that experience is metaphor: Her stories leave us thinking about our own. In essays that are funny self-effacing heartbreaking and wise she shows us that life in all of its choreography and improvisation really is like ballet: Press down and rise at the same time. Descend and lift. </span><strong style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1); background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0)>-Maggie Smith <em>NY Times</em> bestselling author of <em>You Could Make This Place Beautiful</em></strong></p><p></p>