Off Balance: A Memoir Kindle Edition

A memoir is the story of a person's life and their experiences and no one should be entitled to review that. Accordingly, this review focuses only on how the information is presented and whether the audience of potential buyers would take an interest in it.As fans of celebrities we pick up on a person during or after their major achievements. In the case of Moceanu (for most) this would be 1996 when she and the U.S. Woman's team won a gold medal in the team competition for gymnastics. She was just 14 years old. I assumed it took a lot of hard work to get there, and that the path was not easy. I also assumed that it was a childhood lost and replaced with the hard work and determination of an adult. This book certainly confirms these theories. I feel I can write this without it being a real spoiler for anyone.We (the public) see the glorious results and have some appreciation for how difficult it is to achieve the results, but no true understanding. This memoir humanizes Moceanu's achievements and it does it in an incredibly well thought out and touching way. For example, most fans knew her family was Romanian - but probably few considered what that truly meant. It meant that Moceanu is a first generation American who came from a poor family of immigrants... a family which had a financially unsteady situation. It may be hard enough to achieve greatness, but it is even harder living in a two-bedroom apartment with your parents, sister and grandparents. Most great gymnasts tend to be on the small side, but have any fans considered what it is like to be the smallest person in your class selected last to play a sport in gym class, have a funny sounding name and come to school with food that is unlike your classmates' food at lunch time? No one imagines the small tiny hardships that add up to a difficult life when they see a girl and a gold medal on a podium in front of the entire world. This memoir helps you to relate to Moceanu as a human - a young girl who faced kids in school as cruel as the ones you went to school with, but she faced them with much more adversity than most of us did in our own lives.It is a poorly kept secret that elite child athletes often face abuse (which comes in multiple forms: physical, mental, emotional). Gymnastics seems to be particularly notorious for this. What I appreciate about this memoir is that it reads like someone trying to tell a story as a way of explaining their life... and not like someone who has an ax to grind. Many memoirs are "grinding axes" in disguise, but fortunately this does not come off as one of them in my opinion.Moceanu does a great job reflecting on what was great in her childhood and what she appreciated about her life as well as noting things she has set out to change about her own children's childhood. It also brings an additional remarkable component about her lost sister and how the discovery altered everything she knew and perceived about her family which, frankly, was already enough for ten lifetimes!If I had one criticism of the book it is the way in which the chronology was broken up to weave past and current together (i.e. the story of her lost sister). It was awkward to follow and I think the reader's feeling of being disjointed outweighed what Moceanu was probably going for by doing it. This is a small issue mentioned only because no product review should fail to mention "the negative".The story is remarkable and inspiring, there is no question of that. It is told well and with great detail that takes a lot of courage to share with other human beings (let alone publish in a book). You do feel that you are a better person for having understood the path someone else experienced in life and the challenges they faced and the lessons they learned. You can not ask for more after reading a memoir. Highly recommended.

I have a lot of respect for Dominique Moceanu for her honestly in this book. I've read it several times and am always appalled and disgusted by the brutal treatment she received at the hands of the Karolyis. I believe every word of what she says she endured. She's come out of her experiences a pretty amazing woman and it sounds like she's found much happiness as an adult. The part about finding her sister Jen is incredible as well! The book is well written and I highly recommend it to any gymnastics fan or reader of memoirs!

Dominique Moceanu won an Olympic gold medal along with her Magnificent 7 teammates at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. She was only 14 years old, tiny (4 feet 4 inches tall!), cute and charismatic.Her life on and off the gym floor has been difficult. She had complicated relationships with her family and with Bela and Marta Karolyi, her official coaches during her champion years. Her parents were Romanian immigrants, although Dominique and her sister were born in the United States. While she loved her mother and sister, her relationship with her father was fraught with complications. He was domineering and abusive.The book opens when Dominique is an adult, and receives the biggest surprise of her life. Her parents had kept a secret from her and her sister for many years.Dominique is bitter about many things but she also gives praise where it is due. She actually adored her first coaches, but when it became apparent by the age of 10 that Dominique was exceptionally talented - Olympic material - her father whisked her away to the Karolyi ranch in Texas. She was not at all prepared for the transition. She was shy and was used to a positive environment in the gym, but in Texas she was hopelessly confused and upset with what went on. For example, her favorite coach at the gym simply disappeared (he was fired) and no one ever mentioned him again.Much has been made of the fact that she was miserable with the Karolyis. Actually, in this book she seems to be more mystified by their actions. After the Olympics they seemed to want to have nothing to do with her. Even though she won a gold medal, she didn't win any individual medals and apparently that was considered a failure. Even her parents were discouraged from praising her too much.Moceanu's body changed rapidly after Atlanta but she still kept pursuing gymnastics - because she loved it.She had made quite a lot of money from touring in gymnastics shows after the Olympics, which her father had put into building a huge gymnasium. Moceanu famously ran away from home as a teenager and tried to get her legal emancipation from her family. What happened after that is riveting reading.Quite frankly, I was surprised by this book. If you read enough gymnastics message boards as I do, you would think that Dominique Moceanu was the devil, or is at the very least lying in the gutter with a needle in her arm. Many people find her hopelessly bitter because she has voiced her unhappiness in how she was treated many times. Perhaps because she was so cute and spunky while performing, some gym fans just refuse to accept how difficult her life really was?Even before her book was released it was being compared to Jen Sey's notorious gymnastics memoir, "Chalked Up," about that author's bitter experiences in gymnastics. But Moceanu's book is well-written by her "co-authors" Paul and Teri Williams. The book was far more detailed than I expected, although it does slide over some of the things that happened in her career after 1996, spending more time on the events that happened in Moceanu's personal life.Moceanu is currently happy and productive, married to a gymnast-turned-physician, and they have two young children. Her children are involved with gymnastics, since she always loved the sport, but not the outside pressures of being involved with elite gymnastics.

This book follows Dominique Moceanu from her birth right through to present day. The book switches between her talking about her life growing up, her family, gymnastics and her adult life where she discovers she has a long lost sister. There are also two sections of pictures taken throughout this time.I was hooked reading this book once I started. Dominique Moceanu suffered a lot at the hands of both her parents and her coaches. She trained with the legendary Bela Karolyi and it was fascinating (but not always nice) reading about her time training with him and the methods he and his wife used. There is a chapter devoted to the 1996 Olympics and the Magnificent 7 (although secretly I wished there was more - but then entire books have been written about the subject!). It was also enlightening to read about what happens to a gymnast after their moment in the spotlight. Moceanu's career took a drastic down turn after the Olympics and it was interesting to see how she overcame weight gain, lack of a coach, emancipation from her parents as well as other difficulties to try and make a comeback. Towards the end of the book you also gain an insight into the politics of Women's gymnastics in America and the devastating effect this can have on a girls careers.One downside was that at points I felt like there wasn't much about gymnastics - which is strange because over half the book was about her career as a gymnast. I think this was because she focuses on her relationships, difficulties and successes more than on the actual gymnastics. Don't get the wrong idea - there is still a lot of gymnastics in this book, just not as much as in, say, Kerri Strug's autobiography. And also, a lot of the book is devoted to her talking about discovering her sister. While this was interesting I think sometimes these chapters were a little long and the way the chapters alternated between past and present became a little frustrating at times.The only other downside was that it felt like the book was written more for an American audience. In America, Moceanu was a minor celebrity and her life was splashed all over the tabloids whereas I barely knew anything about her. This meant that at times during the book I felt a little lost as I think she presumed the reader has this background knowledge.Overall, I would highly recommend this book. Once I started reading it I couldn't put it down. It shows an interesting, and an important, insight into the life of a young elite gymnast. Fascinating read for any sport or gymnastics fan.

Dominique presents her story of growing up training under Bela and Marta Karolyi to becoming a team gold medallist at the Olympics 1996. The discovery of a sister she never knew she had makes the memoir unique in comparison to other stories. Although this story presents the negative aspects of training and Dominique's family life, the way in which she handles adversity and comes to terms with her past is heart warming.

I really enjoyed this book, from the personal story about over-ambitious parents and a long-lost (and incredible) sister to the insidious side of elite coaching and self-serving nepotism allowed to perpetuate within elite gymnastics which centres power and financial self-interest in the hands of a few. Well worth the read. American elite gymnastics needs to take a look at who has power and whether the tail is wagging the dog.

I read this book within 24 hours. Just couldn't put it down. That (I'll just read one more chapter) moment.Always two sides to a story. Who said being an elite gymnast is easy. Really felt for Dominique during her training leading up to the Olympics. So young dealing with gym life (Karoyli's) and the dramas at home.

A refreshing perspective on the old story (cf. The American Champion biography)...