They're Going to Love You

The novel opens with Carlisle Martin, a choreographer in her forties, recounting how James Sogard, her father Robert Martin's partner, taught a ballet class about "containment": the art of being still within music, absorbing its power rather than projecting outward. A young dancer named Alex, visiting from Atlanta Ballet, experiences a transformative moment and asks to study with James. James later confides in Carlisle that discovering he has not given up on his artistic dreams is more terrible than having let them go, and asks whether "all this wreckage" is worth it.

In 2016, James calls Carlisle in Los Angeles to tell her that Robert is dying of heart disease. Carlisle is forty-three and has not seen her father in nineteen years. James asks her to come to New York once Robert is settled back at Bank Street, the parlor-floor Greenwich Village brownstone where Robert and James have lived together since 1975. Carlisle agrees.

The narrative moves fluidly between present-day scenes and layered memories spanning decades. As a child, Carlisle visited Bank Street each summer for only a few weeks, but the apartment felt like her true home. Robert, a former dancer turned ballet company manager, purchased it with inheritance money. James, a brilliant but troubled ballet teacher and choreographer, became Robert's partner and Carlisle's unofficial mentor. During visits, James spoke to Carlisle as an equal, sharing stories about art, his childhood in Denmark, his father's suicide, his depression, and the devastation of AIDS among their circle of friends. At age ten, James explained to Carlisle that her father was gay and that the disease was killing men they knew.

Carlisle's mother, Isabel, was once a dancer with the New York City Ballet under George Balanchine. Robert, eighteen years her senior, met the teenage Eleanor over the mailboxes of their apartment building, helped shape her career, gave her the stage name Isabel Osmond, and married her. After a traumatic birth and severe postpartum depression, Isabel learned Robert had fallen in love with James. She left New York with Carlisle for Ohio, and Robert agreed to step back from fatherhood at Isabel's insistence, maintaining only financial support and annual summer visits.

As a teenager, Carlisle campaigned to attend a performing arts boarding school near Boston, seeing it as a path to the School of American Ballet (SAB) and to living at Bank Street. She earned a scholarship, was accepted into SAB's summer program, and spent a transformative summer with James. But SAB did not invite her for the full-year program, citing concerns about her height. Every company she auditioned for rejected her. One director told her she was gorgeous but would "pull focus" in the corps, or ensemble, then tried to sleep with her. Carlisle abandoned dance, went to college as a drama student, and spent years adrift in Los Angeles as a personal assistant, consumed by self-doubt.

In the present, Isabel reveals that Bank Street is held in a trust requiring the property to pass to Carlisle rather than James, since Robert and James could not legally marry when the trust was created. Carlisle's instinct is to give it to James, but the revelation stirs old resentments. Meanwhile, her agent calls with extraordinary news: A prestigious English ballet company wants to commission her for a new production of Stravinsky's Firebird. She books a red-eye to New York.

The narrative returns to 1997, when Carlisle was twenty-four. James confided that working intensively with Alex had reawakened his long-dormant creative ambitions. Robert discovered James's emails to Alex and became furious, convinced the relationship was romantic, and forbade further contact. James asked Carlisle to deliver a sealed envelope to Alex at a dance festival in Mexico.

In Mexico, Carlisle began a passionate affair with Alex. She opened James's envelope and discovered his choreographic journal: notes for ballets, drawings, poems, and a section marked "Alex" containing the word "love." She stayed for days, lying to James about her whereabouts. During this time, she took a ballet class and realized she wanted to make dances, not perform them. Alex told her he was in love with her.

On the morning of her departure, Carlisle checked her voicemail and discovered James had attempted suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills. Robert had found him in time. At the hospital, James told Carlisle not to blame herself and asked her to step back from their lives. The next day, Robert found Carlisle's passport and realized she had been in Mexico. She confessed to the affair. Robert was devastated: Someone had seen Carlisle and Alex together and told James, which Robert believed triggered the attempt. He banished Carlisle from Bank Street until she could explain why she had done what she did. Carlisle returned to Los Angeles and discovered she was pregnant. She had an abortion. When Alex learned from a letter James wrote that Carlisle had lied about the extent of James's knowledge, he ended the relationship.

Over the following years, Carlisle slowly built a choreographic career, creating work including a ballet called My Friend, inspired by her deep friendship with Freya, an English playwright she met at an artists' residency. Her relationship with Isabel deepened. But communication with Robert remained frozen at holiday cards, and Carlisle exonerated herself a thousand times without ever believing it.

In New York, Carlisle takes James's ballet class and feels homecoming in her body. James reveals that he and Robert secretly traveled to Toronto the previous year to see her work. Robert said afterward, "She's the real thing, isn't she?" Carlisle is shaken by this hidden devotion.

At Bank Street, Carlisle sees her dying father. He shows her a battered 1950s mystery novel, Death in a Tuxedo, whose first chapter contains a character named Carlisle, solving the lifelong puzzle of her name's origin. They share laughter over a comic anecdote about Balanchine's unrealized ballet featuring dancing apples. Robert tells Carlisle that Bank Street will be hers. He lifts his hand, she takes it, and he kisses it and places it on his chest. Carlisle recognizes that accepting the gift means forgiving him, and possibly all three of them. She stays with her hand on his heart until he falls asleep.

In a private exchange, James confesses he was a coward who sent Carlisle on a "mad errand" to Mexico and should have fought to prevent the estrangement. Carlisle confronts him about his failure to contain his relationship with Alex. James accepts the accusation.

Leaving Bank Street, Carlisle calls Isabel and asks her to come work on Firebird, proposing a ballet about power, freedom, and the bond between mothers and daughters. Isabel agrees. The narrative flashes forward: Carlisle will be present when Robert dies six days later. Isabel will spend two weeks dancing with Carlisle in Los Angeles. The Firebird commission will go forward, with Freya serving as the production's story consultant, and the premiere will bring Carlisle's whole family together. She will wear Robert's watch and think, "Every ballet is about time." The novel ends in the present, with Carlisle outside Bank Street, listening to James play the Firebird lullaby, thinking, "I'll make something of all that. And also, I can love."