Sacha Jones
Born and bred in Sydney, I spent my first twenty years chasing the ballet dream, reaching soloist status for the Sydney City Ballet at the age of 16, and heading off to London on ballet scholarships two years later. After an injury and weight gain led to the collapse of that dream, and having married a Kiwi man back in Sydney, I spent the next twenty years in Auckland Tamaki Makaurau focused on matters of the mind instead of the body, studying and tutoring at university and earning a doctoral scholarship to write a feminist PhD on justice for abused women who enter the criminal justice system as defendants (2009, https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/handle/2292/3429?show=full )
In the second decade of this 20-year period I was also the primary caregiver for (and creator of) our three young children, a daughter and two sons.
In the third twenty years (which I am still in - just), I began lecturing at AUT; returned to teaching dance, and began a creative writing course at Massey, chasing a life-long passion for letter writing and the dream, gradually formed through this writing, of becoming a professional creative writer. Just after my 50th birthday, my first book, a tragicomic childhood memoir, The Grass Was Always Browner, was published by Finch (Sydney, 2016). To promote that I contacted the legendary satirist John Clark to ask if he would read my book, which he generously agreed to do, and then, even more generously, he recommended it to the ABC as something they might like to develop into a series.
Unfortunately, the ABC did not pick it up, nor did the BBC end up interviewing me about my book, as they had asked to do after reading an extract published by Steve Braunias in The Spinoff in 2017 ( https://thespinoff.co.nz/books/24-04-2017/the-monday-extract-the-ballerina-who-was-hospitalised-with-anorexia ). A political tragedy intervened to switch their reporting priorities that week.
In the meantime, I had decided to try my hand at stand-up comedy and found I was something of a natural at it, possibly in part due having been raised on a stage. I went on to produce and perform two successful solo stand-up shows for the Auckland Fringe Festival (2018, 2020), and to get into the semi-finals and finals of various comedy competitions.
In May 2024, I self-published my funny/serious feminist memoir-manifesto on my own and other women's battles with weight, eating disorders and body-confidence, The Fatter Sex: A Battle Plan for Women's Weight Health and Humour under my own printing press, Umbilical Books. I dedicated it to my estranged daughter and to all the other daughters and mothers in conflict on this trickiest of battlefields. I was interviewed for Nine to Noon on the publication date of 7 May: https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2018937319/ballerina-author-and-comedian-sacha-jones-on-the-fatter-sex
Also, after Finch retired in 2019, I bought the rights to my childhood memoir. And this year (2024), I finally republished it, slightly updated and under the original title (rejected by Finch): Don't Laugh: Keeping the Joneses Up, Vol. 1 in May, 2024. Time and funds willing, I hope to publish the much belated second volume next year.
Genre:
- Adult Non-Fiction
- Autobiography / Memoir
- Comedy
- Health
Skills:
- Academic Writing
- Public Speaking
Branch:
Auckland
Location:
Auckland
Publications:
The Grass Was Always Browner
This is the first volume of my three-volume childhood memoir. It finishes with me flying off to Europe to compete in the world's top two ballet competitions. But it's far from plain sailing getting to that point. I started out all wrong for ballet. My dancing success is a surprise to no one more than my Russian dance teacher (the legendary Mrs P), who told my mother from the get-go I was not built for ballet, and an annoyance to no one more than my father, who thinks ballet "a frivolous pursuit." He meanwhile is busy trying to save the Third World by writing a book (!), in a worthy, but somewhat naive and most inconvenient, mid-life crisis.
The Fatter Sex: A Battle Plan for Women's Weight Health and Humour
The notion of 'body positivity' is widely promoted in the modern West as a feminist ideal empowering women to reject the unhealthy pressures of the thin body-beauty standard. But is it really as empowering as it sounds?
In The Fatter Sex, former ballerina Sacha Jones brings a fresh perspective to this contentious issue by highlighting the extra weight and body confidence challenges that modern women and girls face as the sex programmed to store more fat but expected to be more lean. Drawing on her own long battle with eating disorders, weight obsession and denial, as well as the hard lessons she learned trying to raise her daughter to have a healthy and happy relationship with food and fat, Sacha exposes the deceptively and increasingly complex challenges faced by members of the fatter sex as a result of these conflicting pressures.
Through a range of celebrity case studies, she reveals the extent of the modern female 'body battle' and the limits of both 'diet culture' and 'body positivity' activism to effectively fight it. Her eight-course 'feisty feast' of a battle plan is outlined as an alternative approach, with the ultimate aim of empowering women of all sizes (and skins), not least the mothers and daughters, to recognise and find strength in their common cause.
Don't Laugh: Keeping the Joneses Up, Vol. 1
A new and improved edition of Sacha’s 2016 childhood memoir: The Grass Was Always Browner.
As a white haired, green-eyed, ‘black sheep’ growing up in a fire zone, Sacha (then Sally) feels from a young age she doesn’t fit in with her family or general environment and struggles, literally, to breathe. But when a doctor recommends ballet as a cure for her various ills, though her Russian teacher tells her she is ‘not built for ballet’, she finds a way to bend her build to ballet and to breathe easier, succeeding against the odds to go on to win national ballet scholarships and become the youngest star of the Sydney City Ballet.
But when you prove a Russian wrong you are generally asking for trouble and, sure enough, ballet turns out not to be the escape she had hoped for and there is a price to pay for all that easy breathing…
A tragicomic tale of girlhood from the grandniece of Sir Charles Lloyd Jones, former Chairman of David Jones and the founding Chairman of the ABC, and the granddaughter of his brother Eric who was not knighted for his services to retail or the broadcasting arts, because at just 38 he gave up his senior management position in the family firm to play ‘gentleman’s tennis’ on the other side of the world (Wimbledon) and lost his money, wife and good name in the process. This is the first of three volumes of memoir in which his granddaughter seeks, tongue in cheek-ish, to recover something of her family’s lost standing by doing what she can to ‘Keep the Joneses up’. Don’t Laugh.