Do svidaniya

Never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television.

-Vidal

The cover of Johnny Weir's--well, I won't call it an autobiography--his book, Welcome to My World, is pink, but it is an aggressive pink, very nearly magenta. Before drawn curtains with tasseled tie-backs, Weir lounges in black leather leggings and a tank top, supporting a large disco ball on one suggestively raised, stiletto-ankle-boot-clad foot. He is alarmingly tan, a color somewhere between John Wayne and John Boehner. He is making a face that's meant to be sassy but which instead suggests that he has just eaten either a lemon rind or a bad oyster.

Caveat about books and covers aside, the design predicts the dilemma faced by every amateur memoirist: the difficulty of capturing one's own image. It is one thing to photograph well, quite another to take a flattering self-portrait with your own cell phone. Johnny just isn't a very good writer, and whoever edited or ghost-wrote performed only the minimal housekeeping to make the thing presentable. He tries hard to be revealing without being exhibitionistic, but he comes off as merely coy. When he talks about his own bad behavior, his faked injuries or trantrums, he tries to be self-lacerating, but he comes off as merely petulant. His family, whom he obviously loves, are ciphers. His best friend and ex-boyfriend barely register. Have you ever gotten stuck at a party with a gossipy clique who assume you know all the same people they know? The feeling is similar.

I didn't expect it to be a good book, exactly, but I expected it to be more fun, a guilty pleasure rather than an embarrassment. More than anything it made me feel bad for Johnny Weir, because more than anything he comes across as a lovely young man whose self-conscious preening and loud pronouncements on his love of his sport sound to the attentive ear like music played loudly to drown the insistent muttering of regret. Frankly, all that figure skating shit seems even more awful than I'd already assumed it to be, a catty, backbiting sport that is mostly embarrassed by its own artistry.

Weir famously discovered skating on a frozen field behind his childhood home in Pennsylvania, and I can't help but regret that he didn't discover a sawhorse in the garage and take to the barre instead. Of course, the routes to fame for a dancer are even fewer and more circuitous than for a figure skater. Without an Olympic platform, it appears that one must impregnate Natalie Portman to get onto the celebrity circuit, and every page of Weir's book screams another of Vidal's bons mots, that envy is the central fact of American life, but each time Johnny Weir talks about "my sport" I hear a distant echo, "my art," and I can't help but wonder how his life in retrospect might now appear had he become a great artist instead of a decent athlete, modest prestige in the small world of dance instead of gaudy celebrity for everything other than his actual accomplishments as an athelete.