Swimming Studies

I somehow missed this poignant, lyrical memoir, first published in 2012, but I am grateful to have discovered it now. This new edition is just as fresh as if it were written yesterday, and includes a wonderful foreword by Rita Bullwinkel.

Yes, it is a book about swimming, so those of us who have spent thousands of hours clocking up laps will be familiar with the language and practices of swim training (‘Let’s go on the top’) but it is a book that has something for everyone. The first three words drew me in – ‘Water is elemental’ – but to call it a swimming memoir is to do an injustice to what is a series of reflections and vignettes on life that will speak to all readers about the entanglements of family relationships, the idea of specialness, the value or otherwise of stoicism, and the challenges of redefining yourself when you leave behind what you are good at.

Leanne Shapton recalls aspects of her early years as a competitive swimmer, how its routines and regimes defined her life, punctuated by rigour, deprivation, obedience to rules and dedication to winning. In her adult life, she realises, with some shock, that for others, life is actually something to enjoy.

She observes the changes in herself as she moves from competitive swimmer to recreational swimmer. Yet she doesn’t leave the precision and exactitude of swim training behind altogether: in one chapter, trying to capture the taste of a cake she ate in London, she painstakingly tries to re-create it. The end result is ‘Close, but off’, a result that reflects her view on her own swimming career, managing to make the Olympic trials for Canada but never quite getting close enough to make it to the Olympics themselves.

And then there is her taking up of art, where to excel, like swimming, requires repetition, practice, rigour. Her paintings of swimmers and pools are included, plus a section on her swimsuits, which are the mileposts of her life, like the vintage cotton blue and white suit, first worn in the pool where her husband proposed.

Her acute skills in observation translate magically to the page, whether describing the women in the 14-degree water of the ladies’ pond at Hampstead Heath or the silent night swims in Switzerland.

Swimming Studies is also about bodies and the physical form. It is about colours and shapes – of bodies, pools, oceans, swimsuits and skies. She describes the Barbados sky as ‘optical glucose’: well, her wonderful book is my literary glucose. This is a sugar hit to indulge in.