I have read hundreds of war memoirs. Nearly all of them include accounts of wounding and scenes of gruesome injury. I never flinch.
To name just one famous example, Ernst Jünger was hit by enemy bullets, shrapnel, or shell fragments 14 times, requiring 7 field evacuations. His memoir of the First World War, Storm of Steel, never made my spine curl.
Reading Chalked Up: My Life In Elite Gymnastics did. What an accomplishment.
To be clear, I am praising author Jennifer Sey’s talent with words when I say that it physically hurt me to read about her injury experiences in gymnastics.
My bones felt the crunch. My head and neck felt the whiplash of the bad landing. My gut wrenched at the abuses she put her body through to make weight for the team, the coaches who pressured her to ‘play hurt’. Her injury chronicle is raw, real, felt right in the marrow. Ouch.
A different sort of pain informs her second book, Levi’s Unbuttoned: The Woke Mob Took My Job, But Gave Me My Voice.
Per the title of her sequel, Sey describes the pain of being cut off from career success in her prime. That is the core story, but it contains multitudes: the pain of regrets, the painful loss of the marriage she had at the end of her first book, the pain of labor and breastfeeding, introduced at the end of Chalked Up, that only a mother with a tortured body can know.
Her younger brother Chris breaks off contact with her in the hyper-polarized, social media-lubricated atmosphere of covid. That pain is doubled by knowing about her strained relationship with Chris from the previous book. He struggled at gymnastics as a boy, outshined and outranked by his sister. The new rupture in their relationship is a re-injury, a recall of the ankle that never healed.
Read as a single memoir, the most painful wounds are the self-inflicted ones, the self-criticisms. Jennifer Sey has no mercy on herself. Her body and soul each take more hits than Jünger, and all at her own instigation.
Every self-wound burns like fire, stings like venom. Her brutal honesty is honestly brutal, which makes her indictment of other people, and of her sport, even more compelling. The pain they inflicted on her is left without excuses.
Gymnastics was too much of a good thing. Completing a feat instilled confidence in her, at first, but then it became a daily routine of facing down her anxiety. “By junior high school, many of the girls I’d trained with were burned out”, she writes in Chalked Up. “The daily fear of injury was an exhausting strain, and for many, it was just too much to take.”
It proved too much for Sey to take, eventually. Injuries and pressure and too few calories led to gym burnout, so that competitive success was followed by training collapse. Coaches were instrumental in this process. They forced girls to do ever-more dangerous stunts, lose more weight, train with injured limbs.
By comparison, her brother Chris was never under the same pressure. None of the boys were. Gymnastics delayed Sey’s puberty and left her painfully image-conscious, themes that resonate with dysphoria. Sey regrets a cosmetic breast reduction when she breastfeeds: she knows something of the pain that ex-trans mothers feel.
Jennifer Sey has become controversial for her XX-XY Athletics brand. It is her third act, perhaps worthy of a third memoir. While sports are her life and the basis of her brand, Jennifer Sey clearly has compassion and understanding for what many girls are going through when they adopt transgender identities.
They are looking for the brand that fits, and that kind of marketing is Sey’s specialty.
