Swimming Studies

by Leanne Shapton, Rita Bullwinkel (Introduction)

Intimate with chlorinated space; weightless yet limited; closed off to taste, sound, and most this is a swimmer's state. When ten-year-old Leanne Shapton joins a swim team, she finds an affinity for its rhythms – and spends years training, making it to the Olympic trials twice.

Swimming Studies reflects on her time immersed in a world of rigour and determination, routine and competition. Vivid details of a life spent largely underwater adolescence in suburban Canada, dawn risings for morning practice, bus rides with teammates, a growing collection of swimsuits, dips in lakes and oceans. When she trades athletic pursuits for artistic ones, the metrics of moving through water endure.

In elegant, spare writing, Shapton renders swimming as a mode of experiencing time, movement, and perspective, capable of shaping our lives in every environment. The result is captivating and a modern classic of sport writing and memoir from a singular talent.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Sports, Art, Essays, Biography, Biography Memoir

328 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 1, 2012

About the author

Leanne Shapton is an illustrator, author and publisher based in New York City. She is the co-founder, with photographer Jason Fulford, of J&L Books, an internationally-distributed not-for-profit imprint specializing in art and photography books. Shapton grew up in Mississauga, Ontario, and attended McGill Univesity and Pratt Institute. After interning at SNL, Harper's Magazine and for illustator James McMullan, she began her career at the National Post where she edited and art-directed the daily Avenue page, an award-winning double-page feature covering news and cultural trends. She went on to art direct Saturday Night, the National Post's weekly news magazine.

In 2003, Shapton published her first book of drawings, titled Toronto. From 2006 to 2008 Shapton contributed a regular travel column to Elle magazine, consisting of writing, photography and illustration. From 2008 to 2009, Shapton was the art director of The New York Times Op-Ed page.

Leanne Shapton published Was She Pretty? in November 2008 and Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry, in February 2009, with Sarah Crichton Books / Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She published The Native Trees of Canada with Drawn & Quarterly in November 2010. Shapton recently contributed a regular column to T: The New York Times Style Magazine's blog The Moment. In 2011 She posted an illustrated series titled "A Month Of..." to The New York Times opinion page website.

Currently Shapton contributes a food and culture column to Flare Magazine.

In 2012 Shapton published Swimming Studies with Blue Rider Press. It won the 2012 National Book Critic's Circle Award for autobiography, and was long listed for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2012.

Sunday Night Movies, a book of paintings from movies, is forthcoming from Drawn & Quarterly, fall 2013. Shapton is currently working on Women In Clothes, a collaboration with Sheila Heti and Heidi Julavits, about how women dress, with Blue Rider Press.

Source: Leanne Shapton Bio.

Reviews

[Deja Bertucci · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book fascinatingly good. Meaning it was good, and I was fascinated to be finding it so. It's nonfiction, a collection of essays (and some art) about the author's relationship with swimming. She trained for and participated in Olympic trials when she was younger, and the book asks what one does with a skill like this--one we had as a child, but no longer have direct use for. At times she continues to train, but doesn't see much point in it, and other times she just embraces a side interest in swimming pools and ponds and bathing suits and goggles.

Nothing earth-shattering happened as she swam. She didn't make the Olympics, and the book doesn't entertain suspense about that. It's not interested in suspense. But it had some of those moments I absolutely love as a reader: pieces of the world so carefully observed, so simply and clearly and intimately presented that my heart beats a little faster and I think, "Wait, someone else thinks/feel/sees that way, too?" There were a few things in this book that I would have never thought to shape into art, never thought anyone could relate to, but I'll feel a little better from here on out, knowing someone else in the universe sees that corner of things in the same way.

The essays are interesting as essays, too. They taught me something about the form. I always think my essays have to work kind of like machines: all the parts have to be doing work, and by the end it's my job to present the reader with how everything comes together. As a writer I have to poke its meaning out; it's my job. Shapton's essays were more like gorgeous suitcases in which she lovingly arranged a few marvelous, but simple items. She didn't pack them in, just set them all in very nicely, and closed. You're left not always knowing why they all went together, but you sense they do and ought to, and you're glad she put them there.

[Peter Derk]

Once I got a love note from someone that describes what happened with this book. Well, not a love note. A former love note? A What Happened To Us note? Something like that. Anyway, it was a note, pen on paper, and it was about the topic of love, though not professing love.

I get a lot of this terminology confused. You can see why the love notes I've written end up being about 8 pages long, with illustrations. Yes, there are illustrations. The recipient's level of excitement regarding said illustrations will leave me soaring or devastated. Honestly, it's as important as the response to the love note's text.

Anyway, this love note I got said something like

"I'm sorry that you and I never loved each other at the same time."

Let's not dig out old wounds here. I think we all know what that's like, right? I love you at a time when you have a boyfriend. You love me at a time when I have a girlfriend. Or, let's be realistic, at a time when I'm pretty busy having brunches with my mom and taking up a new hobby like safecracking because nothing about me makes sense.

Books, with books I think I could say the same thing.

Swimming Studies, I'm sorry I never loved you at the same time you loved me. I feel like at different parts of our lives we might have been great together. But so far those times haven't coincided. And alas, at some point I have to stop holding out hope that we'll align and fall into that deep love we were meant for. I have to move on. Even though it feels like there's a potential there to be deeply in love, I can't just keep waiting for it to happen.

Goodbye.

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leanne Shapton is my newest writer-crush & possibly the best describer of colors and smells I have ever read. When I read her weirdly brilliant novel/auction catalog "Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris", in which descriptions of shirts and salt-shakers made me cry, I knew it was love. Her latest, Swimming Stories, is a memoir of her time as a competitive (nearly Olympic!) swimmer, which is a brilliant disguise for a book about making art. Her beautiful (mostly present tense) narration moves fluidly but rigorously, like a body under water, through time. It's as if the book itself mirrors the logic of a swim-practice -- ordered, in some senses, and tethered to the material (it includes a photographic interlude on Shapton's extensive swimsuit collection), but with plenty of room for the vulnerable and the dreamy, the poetry of the sun rising pink out the window of a Barbados pool.
She writes, "I have a feeling that things will be -- complicated, mostly sad, and mostly beautiful"

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Somewhat shortened version of my thoughts on this book; full blog post here.)

In the last of the thirty pieces (some all text, some all images, some a mix of both) that make up Swimming Studies, Leanne Shapton writes this:

I think about loving swimming the way you love somebody. How a kiss happens, gravitational. About compromise, sacrifice, and breakup. [...]

I think about loving swimming the way you love a country. The backseat of my father's car, driving through Toronto's older neighborhoods to see the Christmas lights. Framed photographs of a twenty-six-year-old Queen Elizabeth above classroom blackboards, ill-fitting wool coats and fur coats, ice-skate exchanges. A community center pool parking lot at four fifty-five a.m., where sleet makes the sound of brushed steel against a car door. A frozen rope clangs against a flagpole. (The door to the far left is unlocked; inside, warm, the pool lights flicker on in bays.) Ever present is the smell of chlorine, and the drifting of snow in the dark. (319-320)

I love that passage, and I think it captures a lot of what I like about Shapton's style, about this whole book. Shapton was a competitive swimmer in her teens, good enough to swim at the Canadian Olympic trials, twice, and this book is about her life as a swimmer, past and present. It's about growing up in Canada and getting up in the cold and dark for early practices; it's about hard work and sore muscles and the pressure of being a serious athlete; it's about swimming's place in Shapton's life over the years, and now. I like the mix of description and introspection—the book is full of descriptions of the various places where Shapton swims/has swum—from a hotel/spa in Switzerland that offers silent night-time swims for hotel guests to a hotel pool in Canada that's glass-bottomed and overlooks the hotel entrance to a phosphorescent ocean to athletic center pools that look much alike. I like, too, how Shapton explores her ambivalence towards swimming, or maybe just towards swimming competitively, and all that it entails (which is probably similar to what being any kind of serious athlete entails): what is all the discipline and effort for? What does it take out of you and what does it give you? Shapton also compares her past focus on swimming to her career focus as an artist: she explores the idea of "practice," athletic and artistic, considering ideas of "rigor" and "brilliance," repetition and "specialness."

Whether Shapton is writing about the corrections a coach gives a swimmer or about baking a lemon cake or about visualizing a race beforehand (practicing her breathing while making breakfast in the kitchen in the very early morning), her prose is precise and lovely. And her insights are sharp: there's one passage when she talks about watching her now-husband swim in the ocean on their first vacation together, where she writes this: "Watching him in the waves, I realize he doesn't see life as rigor and deprivation. To him it's something to enjoy, where the focus is not on how to win, but how to flourish" (136). That's a far cry from the "total focus and total sacrifice" that swimming competitively demands (that phrase is from a memo to the team from one of Shapton's coaches, during her Olympic trial days) (202). Part of the pleasure of the book, I think, is in watching Shapton explore things like this: in figuring out what swimming means and has meant to her, she's figuring out how she is and has been in the world, and also noticing other ways to be.

[Martyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

When Ann Patchett recommended this book to us at a PLA 2014 presentation I dutifully wrote it down, along with the other titles she put forward, and ordered them up when I returned to work. I put a couple on my to read list for later, the ones that didn't quite grab me enough, but I kept coming back to this one. I loved the cover and was intrigued by the author's art work spread throughout. I was also hooked to this title in particular by what Ann Patchett had said - "I would never have picked up this book, it would have flown under the radar and been forgotten were it not for a community of readers recommending books to each other" - or words close to that. I felt like I should read it, just to test the theorem, and I am so glad I did.

I am not interested in competitive swimming, in fact I am quite anti come Olympic time, and so I am amazed that I found this book riveting. The language is poetic and as literary as any novel. Leanne Shapton can certainly write with mastery and as in all of the best non-fiction memoirs she really manages to blur the line between novel and biography. Although I don't care for competitive swimming I love to swim myself and have always had an attraction to water of any kind and so I was again thrilled by her ability to make the reader hear and smell the surroundings in the various pools she talks about. There is also a poignancy to her writing that I found heartbreaking by the end, she ought to write novels, she is far too talented to stop at this.

In the end she makes a very ordinary world come alive in a way that a lot of novelists would not be able to achieve. But the most stunning achievement is that she makes the reader care. Through her detailing of relationships and feelings at different stages of her life, and the gentle crossing back and forth through time as she tells her story she makes you invest your emotions so that you want her to carry on and on. I was certainly disappointed when the book ended.

Given the way I "found" this title I would recommend it to anyone, anyone at all. It'll definitely surprise you and it may just get inside you as it did me.

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really loved this book. Not all of this book, but most. And I absolutely think it's because I grew up as a swimmer. So I will start this review with a disclaimer: To all childhood competitive swimmers, read this book. Everyone else . . . take your chances. Because I cannot speak to the experience of reading this book without waves of recognition and nostalgia and the desire to point and shout, "Yes! I did/saw/smelled/felt that, too!" However, I suspect that without those feelings, I would probably not like this book nearly as much, and that suspicion is due to the fact that the parts of the memoir that I didn't like were virtually everything that fell outside of the realm of competitive swimming–namely, Shapton's art career and her never-ending tour of strange and exotic swimming pools.

That is not to say that I did not appreciate the inclusion of Shapton's artwork throughout the book; in fact I adored it. The change in medium and, consequently, in pace, really made the memoir a thought-provoking experience rather than just a story. However, anything she had to say about painting I almost entirely glossed over, just like every time her adult self climbed into a random Italian pool, I started skipping paragraphs.

Her accounts of swim meets, however, of practices, of not wanting to swim yet feeling the insatiable compulsion, of the agony of jumping into cold water in the dark hours of the morning . . . all of those things were so spot on, it's hard to believe I never wrote these depictions myself. The tone of the book as a whole is self-reflective and slightly subdued, as if Shapton herself is submerged as she writes it, in the shaded part of a cool, shallow pool. She recounts her feelings of ambition and competitiveness by showing us how she visualized her races while she waited for her breakfast to finish microwaving. Yet we don't feel the rush of adrenaline, of antsy competitive spirit so many athletes have when they talk about their sport. Shapton is calm, analytical, viewing herself with adult eyes, eyes that have already seen herself come short of the mark and be forced to accept that reality.

I will reiterate: any and every childhood competitive swimmer should read this book. You will find gems inside that will conjure up habits you forgot you had and rituals you forgot you followed. You will find yourself missing your stiff, chlorine-bleached hair and the simplicity of counting against a clock. But it's always there, the pool, and Swimming Studies reminds us that, if we choose to, we can jump right back in.

[jiji]

I really enjoyed this book. As an adult, I swim for fitness, and I love the meditative aspects of my long-slow swims; I'm pretty sure lap-swimming is the closest I've come to meditative nirvana and/or transcendence, so when I saw this book on a friend's goodreads list, I (uncharacteristically) splurged and bought a copy. I'd never read a book about swimming before.

I was on my neighborhood summer swim team for three or four years and even did indoor year-round swimming for a while. But I wasn't any good, so I quit all organized swimming when I was 13 or 14. That's pretty much how it went for me in all sports. But Leanne Shapton's memories and observations of the competitive swim world transported me back to my brief swimming career: The florescent light-lit pools, the penetrating smell of chlorine, the transparent crispy blueness of the water, the lane markers, the skin tight Speedo uniforms, the pasta dinners...I remembered it all so clearly reading this memoir.

Shapton captures the boredom and tedium of all-day swim meets so well, I'm practically there. Reading this book, I couldn't help but feel sorry for my parents, both of whom had to sit through those day-long ordeals over and over and over. My sister was a much more talented swimmer than I was, and actually did 4:45 a.m. morning practice and evening practices. Every day. For years. My dad just sat on the sidelines waiting for it to be over, breathing in the chlorinated air and watching the clock for hours at a time. Those were the long-ago days of no cell phones, and my father isn't a reader, so I don't know how he tolerated it.

But back to the book: Another reason I enjoyed it is because I've never had the gumption or the drive or the whatever-you- want-to-call-it to try hard at something over a long period of time, and I love reading about people who can actually carry out things such as dedication and discipline...it's a foreign world to me. This book also helped me understand how painful it can be for a serious athlete to give up their sport, and how disorienting and untethering it can feel to have to do life without your sport. I've never experienced that first hand, so I never fully understood the restlessness my cousin went through when she broke her leg and couldn't do gymnastics for months, or the disappointment my sister must have experienced when she stopped growing at 5'2 and realized she'd never be able to compete on an elite level with athletes almost a foot taller than her. This memoir was a window into a certain kind of loss.

I'm not giving this a five because sometimes she would throw names in and I was like, who is this woman talking about? Was this person introduced before? Also (and I will admit I am NOT a good judge of art) I didn't really like her artwork. I didn't get it. Maybe it was purposely abstract, but I couldn't help feeling like the paintings could have been more successfully rendered by a five year old. But maybe I'm just artistically challenged and unsophisticated. That's very possible.

[Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this beautifully written memoir of a competitive swimmer who tried fiercely to be an olympian. Lovely mix of vivid descriptions, snippets of stories, art and photos. The usual athlete memoir is about triumph; this one is about trying your hardest and still not making the cut. I love it that the author still finds joy in swimming.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm kind of crazy for Shapton's stuff, which makes me kind of a stereotype or something. But super-designy books feel a little like the reward you give yourself for reading lots of books that are mostly just words, and this one doesn't disappoint in that way: lots of watercolors, and toward the end, some sketches (of Vals) that look like they might use thin line magic markers) breaking up prose passages about Shapton's long life as a swimmer-- she tried out for the Olympics in 88 and 92, not making it either time, but obviously still living out some of that experience and the way it required some serious obsession.

I'm not sure the words totally blew me away-- the writing is solid, and parts of it are very moving. But the best part is still probably the facing pages with a bathing suit on a dress dummy and then text explaining where the suit came from. Shapton is at her best with objects, curating and arranging, whether in photos or other visual arts. Her take on words feels insufficiently plastic-- you want her to look at language as concrete, somehow, to make these juxtapositions and echoes like she does with images, and it feels like she's just not there yet, at least in this book.

It's still very good, and probably appeals to a broader spectrum of my friends as readers than most things I read. This might appeal to jocks and would-be jocks, art freaks, fans of women's memoirs, etc. And it's design, as an object, makes me glad to put it on the shelf where I can just look at it's cool blue spine.

[Lara Ryd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sports and poetry are two things I love and often have trouble justifying to myself. In the grand scheme of things, they're inessential. In the midst of global crisis, they're the first things to go. And yet so often these things give aspect and substance to our lives, helping us cultivate and make sense of the things that are essential, like virtue, and friendship, and marriage.

In Swimming Studies, Leanne Shapton unites sports and poetry in a breathtaking collection of personal vignettes about her experience swimming and the way in which swimming as shaped her identity. Following the twin threads of swimming and art throughout many seasons, from childhood through adulthood, Shapton demonstrates the way in which our useless loves help us navigate our lives. They're the motifs woven throughout our narratives, guiding us through the plot, identifying points of tension and error, and elucidating the significance of the story.

Shapton's descriptions of competitive swimming aroused such vivid memories of my own experience as a swimmer that it was hard not to get wrapped up in nostalgia. I related to the author to such an extent that the book made me cry on several occasions. It felt like looking in the mirror at all my own longings, fears, and insecurities, which, for me, is a rare find in a book. I'm certain I'll be returning to Swimming Studies again.

[Lidja · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Studies" in visual art means the artist is practicing various details in preparation to create a finished piece---kind of like doodling to work out specific details. That's exactly what this book feels like. The author gathered up many little exercises of writing about details but never actually created the finished piece. There's no "whole" here. Interesting for swimming enthusiasts, I guess, but not meaningful enough to keep me engaged.

[Veronica Ciastko · Rating 3 out of 5]

miss leanne shapton wrote an interesting, hybrid book full of snippets and pictures and art all about swimming and her life as a pro-swimmer. but there’s something missing in her articulation of what this sport means to her. i felt very far away from her. she remains a mystery, i suspect, even to herself. all that, plus her husband is the editor in chief of condé nast and they have a pool (?) in the backyard (??) of their manhattan house (???). alas, i cannot relate.

[Kate McCarthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's so good I cried when I finished it. The storytelling is simple and beautiful, it felt so familiar. Perhaps I related to so much time in the pool. But the author's words paint these raw and vulnerable scenes so vivid they seem firsthand. And the multimedia bits. It is all so personal and breathtaking.

[Laura Frey (Reading in Bed) · Rating 4 out of 5]

To everyone calling Shapton "just a graphic novelist" (in the context of her judging the Man Booker and longlisting a graphic novel): read this. She's legit.

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

A meditative look back on a personal history with swimming, interlaced with stunning paintings and illustrations. Together makes a special read.

[Kasia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. It brought back memories of being on my high school swim team (I lacked any real talent). I liked how much she tied things to smell especially because the book is rooted in memory. Not a SPORT book but more about her relationship to swimming and reconciling her progress in the competitive swimming world. Closer to 4.5 ⭐️

[Doenja · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved loved loved this. Illustrations, anecdotes, reflections. Perfect read in French summer heat imagining being submerged in water. I now want to read more of Leanne’s work and also find myself googling: “beginners swimming training schedule” (but we will see, might be much less appealing in Dutch rainy fall).

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Impresionante. Una obra de arte.

[Claire Middleton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always find this a thoughtful, meditative read. I don’t know if I’ve ever read something that expresses so well what it’s like to be haunted by the ghosts of who you used to be. It’s about falling short of expectations and dreams yet learning to move the rigor, strength, and perseverance of a sport into equally beautiful and thoughtful endeavors. Even for the non aquatic, terrestrial folks, this book never fails to resonate

[Sian Lile-Pastore · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Leanne Shapton's books - they go beyond writing and are more like art books in a Sophie Calle and Miranda July kind of way.
This book is a memoir of sorts, mainly about swimming, but also about family and love and art and travel. I would say that you would love this book even if you don't have any interest in swimming, but you perhaps won't love it if you just picked it up BECAUSE it's about swimming.
For me though, there was a lot to relate to as I am about the same age as Shapton and also did a lot of swimming as a teenager and young adult, although not nearly as much training as Shapton did (there's no way I would have gone swimming 11 times a week). Her descriptions of the swim meets (which we called galas) brought it all back to me - the warming up, the sitting around, the smells (mainly chlorine and crisps), being obsessed with your times... I just remember our galas lasting all day, we'd get up early and travel by coach (if it was an away gala), go to a new pool, have to hang out there all day to do your race and then hang out some more to do the relays at the end and then a long journey home, stopping for chips on the way, and then getting back late and with an awful stomach ache because of all the junk food.
This book has some great illustrations too - I particulary liked the watercolours of people swimming and the portraits of the swimmers themselves, which also have little descriptions such as 'Ian was the first one to wear mittens on the pool deck like the swimmers from UCLA'.
I loved reading this, and I loved thinking back to my swimming days and the older guys who trained with us too - some who had big chests, bacne, and half an arm - who barely spoke to us and seemed kind of glamorous.
(As it happens, I've been reading this alongside reading The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky in which the first chapter is all about pools and swimming and deals with similar themes.)

[Patricia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a most interesting book, not the least of which which was the cover, which felt like books I used to get out of the library when I was a kid, sort of a cloth finish over cardboard, and the bathing cap drawing on the front was classic. I know one of the reasons I liked the book is because Shapton captured the essence of being a child athlete, in particular a swimmer, whose life revolved around the pool. I know this world as my own. Though I was a synchronized swimmer, there were numerous scenes that felt right out of my youth. I also identified with her life-long attraction to pools and swimming options, and the way in which she analyzed how swimming influenced her adult life and also her struggle to settle the fact that even though one doesn't "win," the effort and the success is nevertheless outstanding. I loved the images interspersed through the book, the artistic studies if you will, and I especially loved the swim suit one. I felt the greatest flaw in the book was her attempt to write it in present tense. This is above all a retrospective reflection/meditation and NOT in the present. So while it had personal resonance and a certain artistic flair both in the visual images and word images, I can only give it 3 stars for literary merit which is probably why it went out of print.

[Janet · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t know exactly what I was expecting but it wasn’t this. Maybe something more along the lines of what it feels like to be an Olympic hopeful training your ass off only to miss making the team TWICE. Leanne Shapton had such an experience not that you’d really know by reading this book. There is just no linear narrative here and what there is almost necessitates knowledge of who she is today: illustrator, art director, editor, author. The book is comprised of short chapters that slash through space and time and are punctuated with crude drawings of swimming pools, swimmers, mountains plus a photo catalog of swimsuits through the ages that she has worn at specific times. Alas, I came for the swimming not for an exercise in scrapbooking.

One thing I did learn is that even an accomplished competitive swimmer has fears – for Shapton it is swimming in open water. For me, a clumsy open water swimmer it is hitting a pool wall and, oh yeah, drowning.

[Carly Friedman · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5-4 stars. I swam for my high school team and never quite gave up the habit. Although I only swim twice a week currently, I thoroughly love it. I love the water, the quiet, and the way my muscles feel energized after a good swim. Shapton captures this and more in this quiet, introspective memoir about her early life as a competitive swimmer. I feel the organization and editing could have been better. Still, I enjoyed her recollections of the stress she placed on herself as a young athlete, musings on love and art and life outside swimming, and art related to swimming. This is a charming memoir for any swimmer!

[Víctor Soho · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dos libros que máis me interperlaron a un nivel persoal que podo lembrar.

Máis alá do evidente para quen me coñece, é dicir, que son unha persoa de costa e, polo tanto, teño unha relación moi íntima co mar e as masas de auga —sobre todo tendo en conta que, como a protagonista, practiquei de forma regular natación durante varios anos—, como por detalles esenciais que non adoito comentar e que comparto coa voz narradora. Por exemplo, que gran parte do que aprecio do nadar é a súa horizontalidade. Teño un problema xenético que fai que me custe xerar músculo nas pernas, polo que estar moito rato de pé ou deportes terrestres cústanme horrores. En cambio, na auga tendes a existir en horizontal. Mesmo cando estas na costa, e a auga apenas cubre, gústame meterme e camiñar a catro palas sobre ela como as crianzas.

Con todo, o que máis me conmoveu e polo que sentín tanta simpatía non é por estas coincidencias biográficas, senón por unha postura común ante o pensamento. Este é un libro dunha nadadora que é artista plástica e tamén escritora. Pola miña parte, teño tantos intereses e gústame practicar tantas cousas que a unidisciplinariedade resúltame asfixiante. Hai pouco preguntábanme, a raíz dun videoensaio, como unía aspectos tan distintos como a paisaxe galega, o suprematismo, o taoismo e a bandeira LGBT. A resposta, para min, era a pura naturalidade coa que penso, dende unha totalidade constante onde atopo rimas e ferramentas de lugares que non teñen por que coincidir. Tamén implica, para mal, que meu pensamento tende ser moi fragmentario, desviándose rápido e traballando máis a relación que cada acontemento-coñecemento.

Penso que este libro, de non ser unha memoria, non me interesaría tanto. Esa coincidencia que noto no pensar afecta á forma na que percibo tanto meu presente como narro a miña historia pasada. Sinto o percibir a vida dunha forma semellante a autora, algo que crea unha conexión moi profundo. Pero é que, máis alá da relación persoal, atopo aquí unha forma de pensar a vida e a experiencia prodixiosas. Entre o arquivista de quen garda toda información e o lixeiro e borroso de quen acepta que o pasar do pasado borra a meirande parte de detalles. Que admirable.

[Zoé Komkommer]

“ Twelve years later, I find myself feeling smaller in the sea again. When James takes me on a short vacation, our first together. I have no idea how to "vacation," how to lie on the beach and relax, wade into the waves, holding hands, how to dress for dinner, swan around in a fluffy robe, book a massage. On our first day I retreat sulkily to the bedroom with a book of Alice Munro stories, irritated by the expectation that I'll enjoy things I've never enjoyed. It dawns on me that I am now the normal person in the next hotel, listening to Nirvana. When James gets back from a tennis lesson, I'm in a better mood.

Watching him in the waves, I realize he doesn't see life as rigor and deprivation. To him it's something to enjoy, where the focus is not on to how to win, but how to flourish-in both the literal and the superficial sense.
I can understand flourishes, the conceptual, the rare, the inspired, and the fantastic. James introduces me to the idea of bathing.”

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Found this book through the numerous book accounts I follow on IG. It’s not a straightforward memoir in that it doesn’t follow a timeline. Rather, the book explores the different experiences that the author has an elite competitive swimmer and illustrator. Some of her prose is beautifully evocative as she describes swimming in various bodies of water to include competition pools, lakes, recreational pools. For anyone who’s been around competitive swimmers, this book will recreate the sights, smells and very unique sensation that comes with being in the heavily chlorine-scented air of a swim meet.

[Mayra Kalaora · Rating 5 out of 5]

umm this is brilliant. so underrated . wtf. the “other swimmers” chapter with the watercolor profiles was absolutely. Brilliant. or the Mom chapter. or every chapter actually. also i like taking notes on my books but this book was actually too pretty to write in.

[Florencia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lo disfruté muchísimo. Tiene un lindo estilo para narrar pequeños detalles. A mi particularmente me gustó porque toda la vida nadé y me retrotrajo a un montón de recuerdos de la niñez.

[Mel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’d never heard of this book or writer before Ann Patchett mentioned it recently on her “It’s New to You” video for her Parnassus book store.
Surprisingly, it was on the shelf at the library where I work.
I’m shocked by how much I liked reading about the life of a competitive swimmer. Especially for someone who hasn’t put on a swimsuit in 20 years.
It was very soothing and comforting. A balm of a book.

[Maxine Rosenfeld · Rating 4 out of 5]

truly lovely, if slightly afflicted by “not like other girls” syndrome. at least 70% responsible for my efforts to get back into swimming.