Spinning Through Adolescence

Analysis of Spinning

On Christmas of 2017, I was given Spinning by Tillie Walden. Being more interested in my other toys and shorter books, I put the 400-page graphic novel on my bookshelf. I tried reading the first few pages, but it was boring and the plot moved too slowly for me when I was younger. Last month, though, I found it and picked it up. Tillie Walden’s raw emotions and inner thoughts were wedged between A Traveler's Guide to Cuba 2007 and a box of unsent holiday cards from years ago. Tillie Walden’s Spinning is an honest and eloquent autobiography about how it feels to grow up.

 The novel centers around her experiences as a competitive figure skater. It starts with Tillie’s family suddenly moving from New Jersey to Texas. It’s unclear how old she was at the time of the move, but she seems to be about eight or nine. She starts at a new school where she is targeted and bullied by her classmate, Grace. She manages to make a few friends, including Rae, another girl at her school who ends up becoming her girlfriend. Tillie continues to figure skate for another ten years, waking up before dawn every day and spending hours after school in practice. Her relationship with figure skating changes over the course of the book, going from being a refuge from her school life to becoming something she dreads and eventually quits.

What I noticed most about the beginning of the book were the binaries. In New Jersey, Tillie went to a public school, got bad grades, and had a skating coach that used fear and humiliation to teach the athletes. When she moved to Texas, though, she went to a private school, had caring teachers, and a coach that was relaxed. Even though her life in Texas seemed too good to be true, she had so much stress in school that she needed to use skating as an escape. This is a recurring theme in the novel. Tillie’s life looks almost perfect from the outside, but her mental health and unseen aspects of her life are enough to make the good parts stale. 

Towards the end of the book, her life becomes too stressful for her to continue skating. Aside from her anxiety and plateauing performance at competitions, the lack of sleep and other social activities become overpowering in her mind. Her parents are also barely accepting of her sexuality, not punishing her but saying that the fact that she likes girls is “unnatural.” She is assaulted by her tutor after he sees her in her skating tank top, which would be enough to make skating become a negative experience. After she witnesses a car accident, she comes to the epiphany that skating is what is making her so stressed and that she doesn’t want to do it anymore. She quits soon after this event.

Tillie grows a lot during the novel. She starts out not only as a pre-teen, but as a passive person who is unable to read her own emotions and know what is best for her. By the end of the novel, she is 17 and knows how to stand up for herself, and knows what is best for her. I would definitely recommend this book. Graphic novels, which literally show the outside of what is happening, usually don’t show how characters are feeling or what emotions are present. Spinning shows Tillie’s inner thoughts and unique perspective. The artwork is also unlike many books I’ve read. The purple and white are the perfect backdrop for the mood of the novel, and I should’ve read it a lot sooner!