Gracie Gold faces her traumatic past in stunningly candid memoir

Gracie Gold in 2023 at her final U.S. Championships (Getty)

It is tempting to see Gracie Gold’s story mainly as a compelling cautionary tale about the mental health risks of a sport in which the pursuit of excellence must start when athletes still are children.

It is also tempting to see Gold’s story as sui generis, the result of a childhood, adolescence and young adulthood spent in a family whose dysfunction she describes with raw detail in the memoir, “OUTOFSHAPEWORTHLESSLOSER,’’ published Tuesday.

Seeing it as only one or the other would be a simplistic reaction to a story so complex it recalls a landmark 1957 movie, “The Three Faces of Eve.”

Rather than Eve’s multiple personalities, Gold had three different personas.

There was Grace Elizabeth, the given names on her birth certificate, to whom image was so unimportant that baggy sweat clothes were her fashion choice.

There was Gracie Gold, the talented and stylish Olympic figure skating medalist and two-time national champion to whom maintaining an ice princess image was so important it became utterly self-destructive.

One of her coaches, Frank Carroll, would compare Gold to the late actress, Grace Kelly, a paradigm of beauty and elegance who became a real-life princess in a fairytale principality.  So, who needed earth motherly Grace Elizabeth anymore, especially when Taylor Swift was inviting you to bake cookies and to join her on a boat trip?

And there was OUTOFSHAPEWORTHLESSLOSER, the image Gold had of herself when her skating career and life spiraled out of control, a vision created to replace Gracie Gold after that persona - and person - came apart with the 2016 world title seemingly in her grasp.

Until reading the book, I knew only Gracie Gold, whom I first interviewed in late autumn 2011, just before her star began to rise.  I covered her career closely (or as closely as a journalist can cover a figure skater, given how relatively few interactions we have with them) from then until she stepped away from the sport for several months in late summer 2017, citing the need to deal with anxiety, depression and disordered eating.

I had mentioned her problems in broad strokes several times, once writing, “Little did we know that such (brilliant) performances sometimes masked the truth, that she was a Pagliacci laughing for the crowd while crying inside.”  (In the book, she writes, “I learned at a young age how to smile when I felt like crying.”)

The former New York Times reporter Karen Crouse, ghostwriter on the memoir, wrote about many of the skater’s most troubling issues, including suicidal ideation, in a story for the Times four years ago.

Even with that as background, the depth and breadth of the problems Gold reveals in the memoir stunned me.  And the way she has been putting her life back together continues to impress.  It is a life that includes the sport she rejected for the “toxic” culture around it but has fallen in love with again, even with her competitive career over. She has been coaching, getting special pleasure from older students.

She hopes the memoir will encourage everyone in figure skating to be more committed to cleansing the toxins that infect many young athletes, especially girls and young women.  She also hopes it will help her reconcile her various “selves” into a single being.

“She might be messy,” Gold, 28, writes.  “But at least she’ll be me.”

She shows her anesthesiologist father as an oft tyrannical, mainly indifferent presence who cheated on her mother and had his medical license suspended for misappropriation and abuse of prescription drugs to which he had access.  She shows her mother, a former nurse, as an alcohol abuser with a perfectionist side Gracie inherited.

Before the 2014 Olympics, Gold became a poster athlete and was promoted as a medal contender despite a middling and limited record in international competition.  On the surface, she had it all from sponsors’ perspective: blonde good looks (no, that wasn’t her natural hair color); power and grace on the ice; and a poised cleverness in interviews.  Underneath, as she admitted to me in an interview on the Sochi 2014 Olympic practice ice, she was terrified of the whole image coming apart like a cheap suit.

Carroll, who coached her to the national titles and the 2014 Olympics, vainly tried to convince Gold that perfection wasn’t necessary.  Carroll told her that being the best of the competitors that day was enough in a sport where skaters often win medals by making fewer mistakes than their rivals.

That advice didn’t connect with Gold, a self-described “judgmental perfectionist whose self-destructive tendencies nearly killed me.”  Put such a person in a subjectively judged sport where the old guard criticizes a hair out of place, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Gold holds nothing back in her memoir, addressing her suicidal thoughts, depression, family trauma, drinking, dietary madness and bisexuality with a candor so visceral it borders on self-flagellation.  That makes many passages in the book extremely discomfiting, none more than the revelation of having been raped by another skater, whom she does not name, at a party when she was 21.

It occurred after the 2016-17 season, the worst of her career.  It ended any chance, Gold writes, of her being able to get life and career back on track without help, which she finally got in 45 days of inpatient treatment at The Meadows in Arizona in autumn 2017.

During her stay at the Meadows, a therapist encouraged her to report the rape.  She did, and the case eventually reached the U.S. Center for SafeSport, where it had languished until the book made it public.

The Center’s chief executive, Ju’Riese Colon, told the Wall Street Journal and the Today show that her organization is reviewing the case and is “determined to understand the reasons for the unacceptable delay.”

That personal history makes it hard to digest the chapter dealing with Gold’s close friendship with John Coughlin, an alleged sexual abuser.  Coughlin took his own life after the Center for SafeSport suspended him from all skating activities while his case was under investigation.  The investigation ended upon his death.

Gold does not duck the seeming paradox in her feelings for Coughlin, who had helped her hold her head up in the figure skating world after she went from national champion in 2016 to an embarrassed sixth a year later.  It is a chapter she could have omitted but felt compelled to include.

“The disconnect between the person I came to love and the one accused of being a monster by others is something I struggle to make sense of,” Gold writes.

She has no answers yet, and she knows they may never come.  For someone trying to comprehend the enigmas of her own tripartite existence, all questions are necessary, and the answer to this one may always be no more definitive than her feeling “that everybody is a mystery, even to themselves.”