Joan Acocella: “What we have here is a painful combination: her sense that she was without beauty, her sense that she could not make the kind of ballets she most valued, her sense that what she did was just a substitute for something else, something more longed-for, which, inexplicably, other people had and she didn’t. Add to this that, however inferior she felt to other people, she also, much of the time, felt superior to other people, and you have an ugly little knot. Which, somehow, relaxed when she picked up a pen.”