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4.05 AVERAGE
4.05 AVERAGE
I've read memoirs by swimmers before, but Shapton's was different. Better. The other memoirs I read because the authors were famous - Amanda Beard, Natalie Coughlin, Dara Torres, Ed Moses, etc. Swimming Studies focused on the experience of growing up a swimmer rather than the outcome. The style of this book wasn't typical either. Rather than write chronologically, the book is made up of little vignettes - windows into Shapton's swimming past. This stream of conciousness style was reminiscent of how your thoughts wander while you're in the water.
Sprinkled throughout the book are collections of images: a series of watercolors of the view from a hotel room, photos of her suit collection, and drawings of all the pools she's swam in during her life. While the art isn't my style, I still found myself absorbed in the images.
Sprinkled throughout the book are collections of images: a series of watercolors of the view from a hotel room, photos of her suit collection, and drawings of all the pools she's swam in during her life. While the art isn't my style, I still found myself absorbed in the images.
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
This book is quietly beautiful, a description of a life of swimming that mimicked gliding through water, and at times fighting furiously through churning waves.
As someone who swam competitively for years and quit suddenly, like Shapton, (though never Olympic level, obviously) I have always had trouble describing both the feeling of swimming and its influence on my life, which I still feel years later. I picked up this book in a random independent bookstore of a city a plane ride from home that I was visiting and will never again return to, and that's kind of how I feel about this book, now that I finished, that I'll never again return to such a beautiful, serine, (watery?) state of mind.
Shapton captures the hate, pain, obsession and love for swimming that I never knew how to describe down to the smell of swimming practice. And she does it with simple, direct, honest, beautiful writing. The anecdotes and details stuck with me- the microwave muffin, the $900 gray sweater, the story of the attractive teenager on a beach, Shapton's fascination with sharks. I found myself thinking of her words as I swam laps at the Y. "When I swim now, I step into the water as though absentmindedly touching a scar". I call myself a writer and a swimmer and I still have no idea how to describe swimming. Shapton describes it with the words I didn't know anyone could ever find and somehow makes my love of water, a shared obsession, even greater.
But it's more than just the descriptions of water and racing. By the end we really get a feel of Leanne and her life and by the end you realize that her relationship with the reader happened entirely through her relationship with water. Usually it takes me longer to read a memoir than fiction, but this wasn't the case with this. I felt almost haunted by it when I wasn't reading it. The variety of the writing and the image and the feeling that I was bobbing along the surface of a pool, looking down into someone else's life made it hard to stop reading. My favorite of the artwork is the "Swimming Studies" dark blue paintings/portraits. This is a book that makes you think, not laugh, which I appreciate. I still need to look up all the places and paintings she referenced, which I should have done as I read/swam. I say that because I could literally taste the chlorine as I read.
I love how Shapton tapered off with and ended the novel with bathing. It felt like she had matured through out the book, with the forms of water.
The last line-"Ever present is the smell of chlorine, and the drifting of snow in the dark."
Ugh. So haunting. I love it.
As someone who swam competitively for years and quit suddenly, like Shapton, (though never Olympic level, obviously) I have always had trouble describing both the feeling of swimming and its influence on my life, which I still feel years later. I picked up this book in a random independent bookstore of a city a plane ride from home that I was visiting and will never again return to, and that's kind of how I feel about this book, now that I finished, that I'll never again return to such a beautiful, serine, (watery?) state of mind.
Shapton captures the hate, pain, obsession and love for swimming that I never knew how to describe down to the smell of swimming practice. And she does it with simple, direct, honest, beautiful writing. The anecdotes and details stuck with me- the microwave muffin, the $900 gray sweater, the story of the attractive teenager on a beach, Shapton's fascination with sharks. I found myself thinking of her words as I swam laps at the Y. "When I swim now, I step into the water as though absentmindedly touching a scar". I call myself a writer and a swimmer and I still have no idea how to describe swimming. Shapton describes it with the words I didn't know anyone could ever find and somehow makes my love of water, a shared obsession, even greater.
But it's more than just the descriptions of water and racing. By the end we really get a feel of Leanne and her life and by the end you realize that her relationship with the reader happened entirely through her relationship with water. Usually it takes me longer to read a memoir than fiction, but this wasn't the case with this. I felt almost haunted by it when I wasn't reading it. The variety of the writing and the image and the feeling that I was bobbing along the surface of a pool, looking down into someone else's life made it hard to stop reading. My favorite of the artwork is the "Swimming Studies" dark blue paintings/portraits. This is a book that makes you think, not laugh, which I appreciate. I still need to look up all the places and paintings she referenced, which I should have done as I read/swam. I say that because I could literally taste the chlorine as I read.
I love how Shapton tapered off with and ended the novel with bathing. It felt like she had matured through out the book, with the forms of water.
The last line-"Ever present is the smell of chlorine, and the drifting of snow in the dark."
Ugh. So haunting. I love it.
Shapton perfectly evokes what it's like to long for a regimen to which you're no longer subject.
This is the kind of book that's different for everyone, I think. There's Shapton's text, about her swimming life, her emotional life, and the love of swimming. The openness in her writing invites the reader to ponder our own relationship with a pursuit, either athletic or otherwise; for me, it is music. So from the very personal comes universal, human themes about being really good but not necessarily great; maturity and acceptance; and learning to present ourselves to the world as more than one thing, one talent.
I appreciate the quiet, thoughtful moments in Shapton's memoir, and even the drawings of swimming pools, swimmers and a resort in Switzerland--all dreamy, unexpected and the pieces of things we remember, and then move on.
I'm glad I read this--made me remember and think about my own life more than most memoirs I've read.
I appreciate the quiet, thoughtful moments in Shapton's memoir, and even the drawings of swimming pools, swimmers and a resort in Switzerland--all dreamy, unexpected and the pieces of things we remember, and then move on.
I'm glad I read this--made me remember and think about my own life more than most memoirs I've read.
Keep a copy handy to shove down the throat of everyone who says "graphic novel".
Aside from the mysteriousness of her transformation into a wealthy jetsetter, all top-notch stuff here. Shapton is so very, very good at what she does. (And she makes it simultaneously look like it's effortless *and* the result of hard work, which is a neat trick. Maybe she makes hard work seem effortless? Or at least she makes hard work at things that mean the most to us seem easier than not working hard at them.)
Aside from the mysteriousness of her transformation into a wealthy jetsetter, all top-notch stuff here. Shapton is so very, very good at what she does. (And she makes it simultaneously look like it's effortless *and* the result of hard work, which is a neat trick. Maybe she makes hard work seem effortless? Or at least she makes hard work at things that mean the most to us seem easier than not working hard at them.)
I am water baby and feel like a swim is almost as much of a pleasurable indulgence as a professional massage. So I'm here for this artsy, impressionistic collage of a memoir that includes vignettes from Shapton's young life as an Olympic hopeful, vignettes of her current life as an artist who continues to use swimming as sort of a design motif in her life, water colour paintings of swimmers and pools, and photos of her collection of vintage bathing suits. Don't expect it to have narrative drive, but if you just want to spend time imagining yourself in pools under many different circumstances, it might be for you.
While I certainly enjoyed the book and adored the author's almost haunting minimalist writing, I did find the book lacking overall. I think this could have been corrected if the book were in chronological order. It seemed disjointed with no sense of an over arching theme.
I am water baby and feel like a swim is almost as much of a pleasurable indulgence as a professional massage. So I'm here for this artsy, impressionistic collage of a memoir that includes vignettes from Shapton's young life as an Olympic hopeful, vignettes of her current life as an artist who continues to use swimming as sort of a design motif in her life, water colour paintings of swimmers and pools, and photos of her collection of vintage bathing suits. Don't expect it to have narrative drive, but if you just want to spend time imagining yourself in pools under many different circumstances, it might be for you.
What an absolutely marvelous book. This multimedia memoir on competitive swimming SPOKE to me because I too once swam at this level and I too swam breaststroke (200m was my best race though, not 100m): the 5am workouts before school, the 3 hour workouts after school / the “dumb focus” and inhuman willingness to train with rigor for a season, a month, four years at a time just to shave a few tenths of a second off of your best time... the weird smells you live with, the brassy hair and google marks.... This book was full of wonderful lines that cut to heart of what it’s like to be drawn to water for a lifetime but still carry a scar from a goal that hovered just out of reach: “It’s a knowledge of watery space, being able to sense exactly where my body is and what it’s affecting, an animal empathy for contact with an element (pg 210)” For me, the best things swimming have given me are my rich inner conversations (you spend A LOT of time in your own head overcoming incredible amount of tedium and pain so best to make sure that what’s going on up there is at least interesting) and that “dumb focus” and “how athletic and artistic discipline are kissing cousins, they require the same thing, an unspecial practice: tedious and pitch-black invisible, private as guts, but always sacred (pg 226).” It’s the fact that it might take a hundred practices to get just a little better, and athletes and artists are cool with that.
Questions I want to ask the author:
1. Do you also pack goggles into your carry-on when flying over large bodies of water?
2. Do you also hate snorkeling gear (or scuba diving gear) because it messes with how your body “should” feel and move in water?
3. Have you also considered trying out for Survivor because you know you’d kill it in all the water challenges?
4. Did you ever have one of those 1990s Speedo backpacks with the giant black flap?
5. Did you ever get swim suit rub on your neck so badly from long freestyle sets that kids at school the next day thought it was a hickey?
Questions I want to ask the author:
1. Do you also pack goggles into your carry-on when flying over large bodies of water?
2. Do you also hate snorkeling gear (or scuba diving gear) because it messes with how your body “should” feel and move in water?
3. Have you also considered trying out for Survivor because you know you’d kill it in all the water challenges?
4. Did you ever have one of those 1990s Speedo backpacks with the giant black flap?
5. Did you ever get swim suit rub on your neck so badly from long freestyle sets that kids at school the next day thought it was a hickey?