Center Center

I follow Whiteside on Instagram - I very much enjoyed his pictorial account of his recovery from patellar tendon surgery. His voice is very engaging. His writing, a bit less unfortunately. This book, which I purchased after reading about it in the Times article about him, was very uneven - but the chapter "The Tenant: A Near-Death Experience" is worth the price of the entire book. Very well-written and hard to put down.

I'd recommend skipping the "musical" altogether. Not even sure what it was doing there.

James Whiteside's Center Center is a delight of a book, sure to appeal to multiple audiences.

Ballet aficionados/ Check √
Queer folk? Check √
People longing for a temporary return to the 90s? Check √
Those needing a break from heteronormativity? Check √
Anyone who grew up feeling different? Check √
Readers who always appreciate a good laugh? Check √

Whiteside is an enfent terrible and Principal at American Ballet Theatre. Well, not really an enfent—but he made plenty of big splashes during his enfent years. Now he's a dancer/drag queen/musician/philosopher non-enfent cultural icon terrible.

As the title notes, Center Center is an almost-memoir. It's Whiteside's life, but not necessarily in chronological order and with some show more stylistic surprises—including a three-act musical based on an unwanted airline layover in Casablanca and featuring Pussycat Dolls songs along with characters named Entitled Rage, Crying Girl, Sweaty White Guy, and the like. Whiteside articultes the inner struggles of coming out in the 90s and 2000s. He offers a manic overview of every pet he's ever lived with. He narrates his mother's life story. And he does this in the sort of writing that guarantees a laugh-outloud-insist-on-reading-to-everyone-else-in-the-room passage roughly every five pages, which means more than fifty such moments in the book.

This is a book to read when you need to laugh, need to see the craziness and beauty in the chaos around you. It will leave you feeling hopeful and convinced that "going for it," whatever "it" is, is always an excellent move.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via Edelweiss; the opinions are my own. show less