Simone Biles

Simone Biles is the memoir’s narrator and main subject. She is an all-around individual Olympic gold medalist in women’s artistic gymnastics, with additional golds in floor and vault and a bronze on beam. Simone is considered the most dominant gymnast of her generation, and her powerful style and high routine difficulty has largely redefined gymnastics.

As both the narrator of the memoir and its author, Simone is able to intentionally craft her disparate life experiences into a cohesive narrative that charts her path, from spending her early childhood in foster care to competing at the most intensive competition in all of athletics. Simone shapes her experiences according to the overarching themes that she hopes to express; although the novel is structured chronologically, its thematic content follows a clear repetitive pattern of establishing and explicating thematic messages.

One of the most important of these themes...