Flight of the Dancer - Lisa Lazarus

“Flight of the Dancer presents a delicate and intricate portrait of a dancer, her family and relationships. At its heart are the complex coercions, deep love and slippage in the mother-daughter relationship – which is finely and memorably wrought.”

– Michael Titlestad, Professor of English at Wits

Intense, perceptive and self-doubting, Julia Glass yearns to disentangle the threads of sadness from her troubled relationship with her mother, dead now for many years. She retraces her adolescence and revisits her young self as a talented ballet dancer with a bright future, along with the compromises she must make. She learns how to manipulate her body as a tool of retaliation against her imperious mother, all while self-sabotaging her own best interests.

At university, Julia falls in love with Steven, a brilliant student, who overwhelms her with his dazzling intellect. Coerced by her mother into an early marriage, she follows her husband to London, and begins the process of unravelling the complex bond with her mother and her fraught relationship with her body.

This is a transformative journey about the indelible bond between mother and daughter and how memory, uninvited, continuously casts its shadows into the present.

By turns gently humorous, raw and painful, Flight of the Dancer is a poignant coming-of-age portrait of agency and acceptance.

About the Author

Lisa Lazarus holds a MA in Creative Writing from Wits University, during which she began to shape her literary voice and work intensely on the preliminary draft that led to her debut novel, Flight of the Dancer. She also holds a BA in Dramatic Art from Wits, majoring in Dance and Dramatic Literature.