The 1992 autobiography of Twyla Tharp, "Push comes to shove", is a curious book, masterful at giving us a glimpse into who Tharp is on a personal level and the evolution of her work over time, and yet suffering from its own strengths, in distracting us from the core of her work. Tharp, in that book (written almost 25 years ago now), is a very wounded individual who penned her autobiography herself and did a very good but not great job. I don't think she'd disagree if she read this, because if she had done a great job her book would not currently be out-of-print, given the immense interest in her from dance professionals and women trying to break glass ceilings of all heights. But after reading it I think I can see why the publisher has not re-issued it.
Yet, before I describe what in my opinion are the weaknesses of the book, let me emphasize I really loved it overall and gave it a rating of five stars out of five on Goodreads. That is because the weaknesses of the book reflect Tharp's personality, and although we are conditioned nowadays to want "heroes" out of our public figures, I appreciate Tharp's honesty in showing us her whole self. The book does a phenomenal job in letting us know Twyla Tharp. I do think, however, that I was most able to appreciate the book because her mother, who is Tharp's main problem and against whom she admitted at the end of her book that she felt rage (with good reason), reminds me a lot of my own mother, although my own mother is far worse. So I was able to empathize with Tharp in spite of her spare, clinical prose, and I understand why she turned out the way she did (hint: personal relationships are not her strong suit) and why she did what she did (more specifics below) because I've done a lot of things to escape my mother too, although thankfully not the things Tharp had to do. Really, if any two women 35+ years apart can be soul sisters, that's what we are. This background helped me a lot to read the book, since it allowed me to connect the dots where Tharp didn't or couldn't.
So, where to start? The first weakness of the book is that it doesn't have a prologue. The beginning should have shown us Tharp when she is already well-established in her field, to make the reader emotionally involved with her story and on her side before she backtracked to her childhood. Instead, Tharp launched right away into her upbringing, and the resentment toward her mother became quickly apparent. It came too early in her book. (Tharp's mother was an extremely prude "tiger mother" who prevented Tharp to develop healthy connections with people her age, something the consequences of which are obvious throughout the book in Tharp's long string of personal relationships, generally doomed to failure and some more advised than others, and her effort in recreating a family out of her professional world. We people who haven't truly had a family in real life tend to do things like that, before we realize the endeavor was doomed from the start, because experiences in the professional world rarely have the duration and intensity of living with family members for years. But we try.)
Most readers haven't had the sort of families Tharp and I have had, where parents try to vampirize their own children so that the success of their kids, kept away from relationships that could distract from The Goal, will increase their sense of self-worth. (Then when Tharp's mother found out she had slept with her first boyfriend, she promptly schemed to have the two of them marry, springing the news on a Tharp still groggy from anesthesia after her wisdom teeth removal, which her mother had decided she needed from the other side of the country. This had just been a ploy to impose her will on Tharp while she wasn't quite able to decide for herself. The marriage didn't last.)
So many readers, not understanding the scale of the problem for not having lived in a family like Tharp's or mine, will simply go "here we go again, yet another writer who blames everything on her mother". (And good things can come out of complicated mother-daughter relations too. Tharp's work, her perfectionism and her ability to walk the less-traveled road all result, I think, from her early life as a loner. You don't become a groundbreaking artist if you're ensconced in your community - if you belong.) As a result, the average reader of Push comes to shove is dumped too early in the middle of a dysfunctional family Tharp that still seemed to harbor some resentment toward, at the time the book was written. This would be off-putting to many.
The deal-breaker, though, comes later in the book, when Tharp suddenly announces that she has had an illegal abortion before her son Jesse was born. (This had never been hinted before in the book, so it felt like a bombshell.) Her reason was that a baby would have prevented her from creating art the way she wanted, because of the demands child-rearing would put on her time, of the expectations of the day, and really the expectations of her family. This happened in the mid-1960s about five years before her son was born.
Then after she married her boyfriend (soon-to-be second husband), she had a second abortion - this time, legal - following the birth of her son Jesse, again because she worried about the demands an infant would make on her time when her career was barely taking off. She mentions, for her second abortion, that the nuns in the hospital did not hide they did not think highly of women terminating healthy pregnancies.
Each of these two episodes is about half a dozen lines, which counts as emotional devastation for Tharp (her prose is very spare), but will seem very meager to the average reader with a non-dysfunctional family because Tharp, not being the effusive or emotional type, does not do a good job conveying for the reader the panic of feeling about to be buried alive with emotionally destructive people in a life she has tried so hard to escape. She does not do a good job explaining why giving the kid up for adoption would not have been an option. (The answer, I think, was that her family would have so relentlessly put pressure on her that she would have had to keep the child, and she worried she would have been a terrible mother, either resentful or neglectful or both and overall a very bad mother to the child.)
Hence, what she writes risks sounding callous and self-absorbed, although I suspect for having had a family like hers that she was desperately trying not to get swallowed or vampirized by her mother. She was trying to escape the quicksand of her childhood through a complete commitment to dance. In a way, I think one can argue her entire personal life has been collateral damage to that. But Tharp will lose the connection with some of her readers there, especially the second abortion, when she was married and the father of her child was her husband. I suppose you can say she did what she felt she had to do, and as I've written above, I think one can still respect her professional achievements while recognizing that she made choices in her personal life that some people would disagree with. But again, that's what she felt she had to do, and she doesn't hide that it took a toll on her.
The other point that stands out in the autobiography is the three lines Tharp spends writing about her night of love with Mikhail Baryshnikov. This is purple prose at its most embarrassing so I won't repeat it there, although you can find the passage quoted on the book's Goodreads page. But it brings me to my key point: it is a widely-accepted lesson in PR that, whatever document you plan to give to the press, you should first identify its three main "nuggets", because those are the parts that will be quoted, repeated and amplified. Then you have to ask yourself whether those nuggets truly are what you want your audience to take away from the book.
Here, the three key points that stand out in my mind are: (1) first abortion, (2) second abortion and (3) the night with Baryshnikov. None of this has a direct connection with Tharp's work. That is, in my opinion, a problem - that a very informative book would be reduced to nuggets with only marginal relevance to Tharp's dances.
If we allow ourselves five nuggets of information, though, we can add that Tharp (4) truly believed in the concept of professional family - she went to extreme lengths to get them well paid when she could, for instance, and created a robust community of dancers to whom she was very loyal as long as they were loyal to her (I'm telling you, she and I are soul sisters) in order to recreate some sort of family in her life, and (5) struggled all her professional life with the push and pull of wanting her own company but not wanting the responsibility, preferring to create without constraints. This is also, in my opinion, a direct consequence from her mother's attitude. My mother is like that too. I can't talk for Tharp, but my own mother's attempt to vampirize me made me very ambivalent toward people depending on me because I felt I'd had my blood sucked dry when I was younger, by someone who should not have been using me for emotional fulfillment. I've tried to create some sort of family at work, the way Tharp does, except that I've come to the realization that becoming a family member requires many hours spent together, and if your family of origin is messed up, then it is a bit naive to think that you can find a new one through work and everything will be alright. It is even more naive when those people are people who work for you, i.e., you are in a power relationship with them.
On occasion, Tharp seems to be settling scores - for instance with the lawyer who helped her at first and became her business manager for a few years, and with whom she hints she was romantically involved, although I read in "Howling near Heaven", which I write about in my next post, that it is actually not clear whether the two were romantically involved. Tharp doesn't mince words about him from the beginning, and later she suggests that he hit her once and that is an example of her relationship problems. She is clear-eyed about herself when she says that most of her romantic relationships were with people she met professionally and ended when the project they were working on ended. Her own son asked her to send him to boarding school when he was a teenager because he felt he would be better off there.
One of the more remarkable features of the book is Tharp's willingness to show herself to us without varnish or embellishment. We live in an era of hero-worship, so even in 1992 this may have worked against her, and her determination to be well-paid for her work may have created some resentments here and there (as Marcia Siegel suggests in Howling near Heaven that Tharp has a bit of an ego).
But what I see in Tharp is an extraordinarily talented woman, determined, driven, aware of her worth, with a few very strong friendships and a string of romantic relationships with other successful and usually creative people, who has walked her own professional path for over 50 years. For having had a mother like hers, I can testify to the danger of losing one's mind in that sort of family, and to the accomplishment it was that she was able to escape and thrive on her own terms. She did what worked for her, and she is one of the most inspiring creative women working today. I'm looking forward to her 50th anniversary tour when it stops by New York City in November.
