If You Say So by Michelle Herman

About the Book

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.

Praise for If You Say So

If You Say So 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.” —Maggie Smith, NY Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful

Praise for Michelle Herman

Persistently amusing and endearingly eccentric … [Herman] demonstrates the elasticity and élan of the personal essay in the hands of a consummate practitioner, as well as the plentiful resources of its author’s consciousness. —Phillip Lopate

Michelle Herman knows the truth: like water, love assumes the shape of the vessel, always imperfect, that holds it. —Kathryn Harrison

Herman’s prose is that of a talkative friend whose passion for their subjects is unerring. [Her] narrative voice takes the reader by the arm and starts sprinting over the vast terrain of her subjects, and it only stops to point out new discoveries. —The Rumpus

Herman, with a seemingly effortless and natural essayistic voice, analyzes and examines and tests and tests again her own sense of what she knows (and we know)—that question Montaigne asked himself in the sixteenth century. Herman’s style is intensely conversational, as if you were sharing a long cup of coffee and getting straight to the story of a life. —Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction