Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Smartass: Memoir of a Mouthy Girl

Smartass: Memoir of a Mouthy Girl

Sayre Smith, Emily

Paperback

Biographies GeneralDanceAddiction & Recovery

Publisher Price: $17.99

ISBN10: 164742982X
ISBN13: 9781647429829
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: Oct 7 2025
Pages: 280
Weight: 0.81
Height: 0.83 Width: 5.59 Depth: 8.49
Language: English
Perfect for anyone interested in the behind-the-scenes of the ballet world, a rousing memoir of a brash young ballerina from a dysfunctional family who achieves her greatest dream only to realize--as she begins to find success--that she's gay.

With a priest for a father and a magician for a mother, Emily Sayre Smith was always going to have an interesting life--for better and for worse. Here, she recounts what it was like coming of age in Texas and Arizona in the '50s, '60s, and '70s in a decidedly dysfunctional family.

To escape her turbulent family life, Emily throws herself into her ballet classes, where she can dance out the anxiety in her body and take refuge in fantasy worlds. Driven by the dream of being a ballerina, she earns scholarships and lead roles, studies in London for two years, and eventually lands back in Tucson, where she joins a fledgling ballet company and falls in love--with a woman and with marijuana.

Join Emily as she survives her troubled family, hangs out with dance royalty, saves Martha Graham, meets the Queen of England, slings hash in a diner, discovers her sexuality, and tries to figure out how it's all going fit together in her ballerina world in this story of a brave and sometimes bumbling girl charging her way through life.

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