[4][5] The idea for Spinning first came to Tillie Walden when she attempted to make a short comic about ice skating at the end of her first year at the Center for Cartoon Studies.

Walden realized that she had "too much baggage with skating to even make a small comic about it," and began working on the book that summer before her second year.

"[6] In her review, Rachel Cooke of The Guardian wrote: "Intimate and charming, Spinning already has the feeling of a coming-of-age classic – and yet, amazingly, its talented author has only just hit 21.

"[2] The New York Times's Douglas Wolk described the novel as "engrossing, gorgeously quiet",[5] while The Austin Chronicle's Wayne Alan Brenner called it a "powerful work of real-life storytelling".

Club's Oliver Sava named Spinning as one of the best comics of 2017,[12] and it was tied for third place in Publishers Weekly 2017 Graphic Novel Critics Poll.