Swimming Studies

(Paperback)

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With a new introduction by Rita Bullwinkel

A brilliantly original, meditative memoir, a 'fusion of cool, clear-eyed prose and watercolours, photographs and portraits' (Time Out New York), that explores the world of swimming.

Intimate with chlorinated space; weightless yet limited; closed off to taste, sound, and most sight: 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 emerge: 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 profound: a modern classic of sport writing and memoir from a singular talent.

Reviews

'If there is a more beautifully observed examination of the weightlessness, silence, rigor, and delight of what it means to swim, I've never read it.' David Rakoff
'Expresses what it's like to be haunted by the person one used to be, and the search for how that person exists in the present. Leanne Shapton writes with such curiosity, ruefulness, intelligence, and grace.' Sheila Heti
'Her honed attention to detail gives the reader the sensation of watching a meticulous mind watching itself, down to the hundredth of a second.' New Yorker

Author Bio

Leanne Shapton is a painter and writer. She is the author of several books including Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry, and the children's book Toys Talking. Swimming Studies won the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She is currently the Art editor at the New York Review of Books.

Rita Bullwinkel is the author of the novel Headshot (2024), a Pulitzer finalist, and the short-story collection Belly Up.