Bertine, Kathryn 1975-

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Bertine, Kathryn 1975-

PERSONAL:

Born May 11, 1975. Education: Colgate University, graduated, 1997; University of Arizona, M.F.A., 2000.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—The Robbins Group, 405 Park Ave., New York, NY 10020. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer and athletic coach. ESPN.com, columnist, 2006—. Coaches ice skating; toured as ice skater with Holiday on Ice and Hollywood on Ice.

AWARDS, HONORS:

AWP Intro Award, 1996 for an essay titled "Life Explosion"; AWP Intro Award, 2000, for an essay titled "The Gibbledeschnarf."

WRITINGS:

All the Sundays Yet to Come: A Skater's Journey (memoir), Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 2003.

Contributor to periodicals, including Triathlete, Inside Triathlon, and Us Weekly, and ESPN magazine.

SIDELIGHTS:

Athletically inclined from the time she was a little girl, Kathryn Bertine began focusing on the sport of figure skating when she was eleven years old. In her memoir, All the Sundays Yet to Come: A Skater's Journey, Bertine describes her experience as a professional figure skater, joining up with Holiday on Ice and then touring in South America with Hollywood on Ice. The latter is a low-cost outfit that puts the skaters up in cheap hotels and holds forced weigh-ins to make sure the skaters remain svelte, a demand that leads Bertine to develop an eating disorder and become seriously ill as she becomes obsessed with being thin. The author also writes about various disappointments and pressures in her life outside of skating, including her difficult relationship with her mother, who did not want an athlete for a daughter. Nicholas Fonseca, writing in Entertainment Weekly, called All the Sundays Yet to Come a "graceful memoir tinged with can-you-believe-this? bitterness." In a review in People, Amy Waldman referred to the memoir as "alternately inspiring, funny and alarming." A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote: "Her book should serve as a cautionary tale for ambitious young people who hope to make it to the top in the sports world."