Martha Graham: A Dancer's Life holds important messages for all readers about realizing their ambitions. Once she had seen Ruth St. Denis dance, Graham had found her destiny. She is determined to achieve it at the cost of any obstacle in her way.

She began her training late for a dancer.

She was not physically attractive and her body shape and size (a mere five foot, two inches) did not fit into traditional dance norms. However, these physical limitations did not deter her single-mindedness about becoming a dancer. Freedman includes Graham's early financial troubles which forced to her to borrow money from her mentor and lover Louis Horst, make her own clothes, and become a vegetarian. Her fiery temperament incinerates anything—even friendships—that might interfere with her life's work. She purposefully avoids bearing children. "I couldn't control being a dancer," she...