Seven titles in which swimming says something about life

Katherine Brabon is the award-winning author of The Memory Artist and The Shut Ins. Her writing has been supported by Art Omi New York and the UNESCO Cities of Literature International Residency. She lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia.

Body Friend is Brabon's U.S. debut.

At Electric Lit the author tagged seven

books in which local pools or other bodies of water are a kind of character, where swimming says something about life. These aspects aren’t necessarily the driving force of a book—while sometimes swimming is a constant thread through a person’s life or at a challenging time, in other books they make up incidental moments that nevertheless speak to something about bodies, relationships, or life.

One title on the list:

Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au

This is one of those examples of a brief, almost missable reference to swimming in a book—though Au’s is a slender, delicate piece of writing that commands us to pay attention to every single line. The narrator is a woman from Australia who travels to Japan to meet her mother for a short holiday. The passage in which swimming features is preceded by the narrator’s reflections on how she “liked the idea of living according to a certain strictness or method,” whether in her studies or working in a restaurant. Her attitude to swimming also says something about her: “Walking back from the pool…I felt something—my body as my own, strong and tan, which could be anything I wanted it to be, so long as I worked hard enough.” I know this feeling, on leaving the pool, of being capable of anything. Through my own health challenges and living with a chronic illness, the pool has suggested so much possibility for healing and betterment, even if only temporarily.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue