50 Shades of Grey meets ballet in Mick Jagger’s partner Melanie Hamrick’s steamy erotic fiction novel
- Former ballet dancer Melanie Hamrick’s debut book First Position delves into the sex-filled world of ballet and was inspired by 50 Shades of Grey and Black Swan
- It also touches on the serious issue of young women being mistreated by powerful men in charge, something Hamrick says ‘happens in every career, everywhere’
Melanie Hamrick, who knows her way around a quick pirouette, had to move fast when her six-year-old son Deveraux recently picked up a copy of her new novel, First Position, as she was signing books.
“I didn’t realise how well he was reading,” the former ballet dancer and first-time author says of her first-grader, whom she shares with partner Mick Jagger, the Rolling Stones singer she has reportedly just become engaged to. “He opened it and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, give me that book!’”
She suggested an alternative: The Cat in the Hat.
Wise move. First Position is the novel’s name but it might easily have been called “Fifty Shades of Ballet”.
Hamrick, who spent 16 years at American Ballet Theatre (ABT) before leaving to raise Deveraux, writes about a young dancer, Sylvie, who joins a prestigious national ballet company and tries to make her mark.
