[3] Her father, Jack Kirkland, was a playwright who penned the Broadway adaptations of Tobacco Road and Tortilla Flat.
[1] Kirkland joined the American Ballet Theatre in 1974, and performed as a principal dancer in a number of classical ballets including the title role in Giselle, Kitri in Don Quixote, Clara in The Nutcracker, Swanilda in Coppélia, Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty, Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, the Sylph in La Sylphide, Lise in La Fille Mal Gardée, Odette/Odile in Swan Lake, Nikiya in The Kingdom of the Shades, the Mazurka and pas de deux in Les Sylphides, and the Sleepwalker in La Sonnambula.
[1] Kirkland was repeatedly fired (but always rehired) by American Ballet Theatre for drug abuse and erratic behavior.
[8] In 2007, Kirkland, Michael Chernov, and American Ballet Theatre artistic director Kevin McKenzie choreographed a new production of Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty, in which, after an absence from the stage of more than 20 years, she danced the role of "Carabosse, the Wicked Fairy".
The book describes in detail her struggles with her domestic family problems, sibling rivalry, anorexia, bulimia, plastic surgeries, drug addiction, her quest for artistic perfection, and her complicated love affairs with Mikhail Baryshnikov and numerous other men, most of whom she encountered in the ballet world.
Dancing on My Grave was dedicated to Joseph Duell, a dancer with the New York City Ballet who had committed suicide that same year, in 1986, in hopes "that the cry for help might yet be heard".
[citation needed] She danced Romeo and Juliet with Anthony Dowell and Sleeping Beauty with Stephen Jeffries.