Confessions of an Ageing Figure Skater

Description

About the book

Confessions of an Ageing Figure Skater is a novel about childhood, discipline, and what happens when systems built to create excellence fail to provide care.

Told from the perspective of an ageing narrator looking back, the book explores the experience of growing up inside a world where precision, repetition, and performance were rewarded — but vulnerability was largely ignored.

Figure skating here is not presented as glamour or nostalgia. It is a highly controlled environment in which bodies are trained early, mistakes are costly, and silence is often mistaken for resilience.

Vulnerability and exposure

As the narrative unfolds, the book examines how institutions — sporting, cultural, and educational — can mistake compliance for consent and achievement for wellbeing.

The young skater at the centre of the story is neither celebrated nor condemned. Instead, the novel asks a harder question:

What responsibility do systems bear when they ask children to carry adult expectations?

The result is a portrait of excellence achieved without protection, and of adulthood lived with the long after-effects of that imbalance.

Memory, care, and distance

Written with restraint and clarity, Confessions of an Ageing Figure Skater resists melodrama. There are no villains and no easy resolutions. What remains instead is a careful attention to memory, to the limits of care, and to the quiet cost of being very good at something very young.

How this fits the Confessions series

This book occupies a pivotal place in the Confessions series.

While earlier titles explore obsession and fantasy, Figure Skater introduces a more troubling theme: the failure of protection. It marks a shift from self-driven pursuit to institutional responsibility — a concern that deepens across later books in the series.

Who this book is for

This book will appeal to readers interested in:

vulnerability and care

childhood and institutions

sport as a cultural system

contemporary literary fiction

reflective, ethically serious storytelling

No interest in figure skating is required.