Since the movie “Black Swan” hit the theaters, people have been asking me if the movie is based on my book “White Swan, Black Swan,” a collection of short stories about the ballet world. No, it is not, but I can see the similarities. No one stabs herself in the face with a steel nail file in my book nor does a dancer ram another into a mirror and then stab her in the abdomen with a shard of its glass nor do black feathers sprout from any of my dancers’ arms, but there are other horrors within the ballet world that “Black Swan” depicts quite accurately. Allow me to recount them.

One. The Bloody Feet. The soft ballet slippers a little girl wears to her first ballet lessons are not the stuff of which dreams are made. All little girls long to wear those pink satin toe shoes with the ribbons that criss-cross so prettily across the ankle—and most girls stick around the ballet studio long enough to earn their first pair. Imagine their shock when they stand up into the agonizing reality of them. Most quit dancing soon after. Those of us who remain at the barre endure the slow deformity of our feet, the sprouting of bunions, the eruption of bloody blisters. No matter how we tape our toes, spray them with New Skin, cover them with BandAids, or try to shield them from the rigidly starched boxes of the satin shoes with reams of lambs wool or foam pads, a dancer’s toes are marked, sometimes every single one of them at once, with bloody blisters. Ballerina Natalia Makarova could not be coaxed out of her then very recent retirement for a benefit performance because, she said, she could not stand to put those pointe shoes on one more time.

Two. The Weight. Some blame the great choreographer George Balanchine for the fact that at some point in the mid-twentieth century ballet dancers were suddenly expected to be thin. Very thin. And the movie does depict a very thin Natalie Portman afraid to eat even a finger of cake. And she should be afraid. At my ballet school, we were weighed every Monday morning on a scale in the director’s office. Sunday night was, therefore, for all of us, an orgy of purging that involved both vomiting and enemas. One Monday, when it was discovered I had gained a pound, the director took my hand in his and gave it a slap.

Three. The Self-Abuse. Portman scratches the skin of her back to raw patches in “Black Swan” and covers up the rake-like marks with her leotard. Young woman are prone to vicious acts of self-destruction when over stressed, and the competition at a ballet school especially lends itself to stress. A dancer at my school pulled her hair out in patches. My niece, currently a ballet girl, wrote herself a warning, which she then posted on her bedroom door: “While you’re sitting there resting, someone else is practicing and practicing and getting better than you.”

Four. The Ballet Mother. All studios are haunted by them and all ballet teachers exploit them. These are the mothers who help sew the costumes, ferry the girls around to classes and rehearsals, usher at the recitals, supervise the girls in the dressing rooms, host the post-performance parties. Without this volunteer force, the ballet school could not function. Colleen and Patricia Neary—both ballerinas with New York City Ballet—famously had such a mother, Elinor, who sewed extra jewels onto costumes, shortened skirts, and threw parties at which dance celebrities and movie stars ate her roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. But the ballet mothers also serve as Greek chorus—monitoring the progress of their own daughters, measuring that progress against the progress of others, intensifying the competition between the girls, and deifying the most talented at the expense of the lesser. Even if the lesser is one’s own. Neary’s mother once told her daughter Colleen exactly what she was doing wrong when she performed her cabrioles—and damn if she wasn’t right.

Five. The Injuries. The bane of every dancer—the shard of glass Portman’s character shoves into the waistline of her rival effectively removes Mila Kunis’s character from the competition for the leading role. Injuries haunt the theater, stealing coveted roles from one dancer and awarding them to another. In bad ballet novels, rivals fill each other’s pointe shoes with ground glass. The Russian ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska, the subject of my latest novel, sabotages a rival’s performance by opening the latch of a chicken coop and loosing the squawking birds onto the stage. (The imperial theaters were famous for the verisimilitude of their sets and props.) But most injuries are inflicted by the absurdly difficult demands of the art—a broken foot bone, a ripped tendon, knee problems. Baryshnikov describes having to crawl across the floor from the bed to his shower in the morning. The Royal ballet dancer Christopher Gable had to retire early because of vocationally-induced arthritis. Balanchine’s last ballerina, Darci Kistler has had a career marked as much by injury as by unforgettable performances. Suzanne Farrell, famous for her 180 degree extension in arabesque, underwent a midcareer hip replacement.

Six. The Tunnel Vision. Girls who want to be ballet dancers live like nuns. Portman said in an interview that training for the film had her living an almost monastic life. When I interviewed New York City Ballet dancer Jennie Somogyi for a magazine article, she told me during a ballet season she never saw the light of day. Company class was followed by an afternoon of rehearsals and then by a race across Lincoln Center plaza from the Rose Building to the theater, where she performed at night. A ballet girl’s life is but a miniature version of that—by the time I was ten years old I was on full scholarship, taking class six days a week. By the time I was in tenth grade, I attended high school for exactly three hours a day and spent the rest of my time, seven days a week, at my dance studio. The twenty-eight year old ballerina Alexandra Ansanelli, most recently of the Royal Ballet in London, just announced her retirement. She had no time, she said, for anything else in life, including her family.

Seven. The Sexually Predatory Ballet Master. In “Black Swan,” the ballet master and choreographer played by Vincent Cassel seduces the women who star in his ballets, both the characters played by Winona Ryder and by Natalie Portman—and ballet lore is filled with men who did exactly that. Sergei Diaghilev fell possessively in love with both Vaslav Nijinsky and Sergei Lifar, who then became world famous stars of Les Ballets Russes. But Diaghilev died at fifty-seven. George Balanchine, who lived until seventy-nine, was able to out love him, marrying four times and falling in love more times than that—always with dancers. The ballerinas Tamara Geva, Alexandra Danilova, Diana Adams, Maria Tallchief, Tanaquil LeClerq, Suzanne Farrell were objects of his affection and muses for his creations—even if that attention was a source of pain. Farrell confesses in the documentary “Elusive Muse” that she once considered suicide as a way to free herself from Balanchine’s obsessive grip.

Eight. The Fear of Aging. Every dancer has a just a very few years in which to perfect her craft and to display that perfection upon the stage. She starts lessons at six years of age in America and by sixteen or seventeen, eighteen at most, she is taken into the corps de ballet of a company. By twenty, she’s already considered too old. I arrived in New York as a trainee for Harkness Ballet when I was seventeen. I never told anyone when I turned eighteen because eighteen was too old, way too old. This wasn’t just my opinion. I was told so at the School of American Ballet, where I auditioned for a scholarship. Girls my age were already dancing in the corps de ballet. And the girls there will find themselves, if they aren’t soon enough promoted to soloist or principal dancer, out of a job. Dancers are called girls and boys for a reason.

Nine. The Short Season. A dancer’s career is very short. By thirty, most dancers have retired. If a girl is very talented, she may dance until forty, at which time she will be forced to retire by the diminished capacity of her body. Gwen Verdon once said all dancers die two deaths, the first suffered when she retires. The aging Winona Ryder’s character is so desperate at having been booted out of her dressing room and from there out of the company that she haunts the perimeters of the theater, making scenes, and finally, attempting suicide. When Mikhail Baryshnikov described a dancer’s life as “a beautiful tragedy,” its brevity is what he was talking about.

Ten. The Worst. Worse than Retirement. The Interruption. Barbara Hershey brilliantly portrays Natalie Portman’s mother, the woman cheated out of her career, she says, by her unplanned pregnancy, at twenty-eight, a statement at which Portman scoffs. “What career,” Portman mutters under her breath at her mother, “You were twenty-eight and in the corps de ballet.” Translation: You were nothing. You were never going to be a ballerina. But Hershey, never having had the chance to fully determine the extent of or the limits of her talent, is haunted by the interruption, and lives vicariously, creepily, through her daughter. I too was a ballet girl, interrupted, and I understand how Hershey is haunted by what could have been, might have been. But my daughter isn’t interested in the ballet. So I’ve had to write books about it. Three of them.