A review by erincampbell87
Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton

4.0

This beautiful little book tries to answer the question, what happens to the expert versions of us? What happens to the skills we work so hard to perfect, the hours we spend training to be a certain way, to the exclusion of what feels natural? I felt a simple kinship with this story, as a former adolescent competitive swimmer who gave it up for a longing to make art, to use my hands, to take on a quiet obsession that merely replaced but did not absolve the way I’d trained myself to train. Like the author, through swimming and through art, I’d taught my brain to count and catalogue and observe my way through the quiet, solitary parts of life. To rethink pain and open space and even a sense of time. The book ends with a reference to the ever-present smell of chlorine because that’s maybe what all our lives become - the hint of the memory of something that was overpowering, all-consuming.