Book Of The Month: Swimming Lessons
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Melancholic and mysterious, Swimming Lessons details the slowly unravelling spool of an inspiring woman’s concealed inner conflict and ultimate disappearance.
Swimming Lessons
Originally Published: 2017
Pages: 356
Available on: Kindle, Audiobook, Paperback, Hardcover
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Claire Fuller is a humble and subtle writer, and her Swimming Lessons is a beautifully sculpted, poetic and tragic piece of fiction, flowing effortlessly. Hooking readers from the start, you won’t feel released until you close the book after the last sentence, and you feel a little changed after reading it. There is a wild and natural essence to the writing that draws you in.
Our female protagonist, Ingrid, has a heart caught between desires for different destinies. As a young college student with a bright future, big plans, and no intention of settling down, she becomes irresistibly drawn to her older, womanizing literature professor, Gil. Her future’s trajectory is thrown as student and professor fall in love, become pregnant, and get married in a whirlwind summer romance.
““May your bones be washed by the saltwater, your spirit return to the sand and the love we have for you be forever around us.””
At just age 20, Ingrid struggles to let herself be content as a housewife and as a mother, and every reader’s emotions become tied up in her struggle for fulfillment. The family lives in an isolated seaside cottage, and Ingrid frequently makes solo, daring swims in the sea. Her husband of the wandering eye never changes his philandering ways and prioritizes his growing fame as a writer above his family.
Ingrid finds herself in the very position she never wanted to be in: a stay-at-home mother of two children, whom she loves, but feels deserve a better mother, and stuck with an unfaithful, absent husband. Drowning in guilt, betrayal, dissatisfaction, and mislaid dreams, she struggles to make the best of her situation and keeps her unhappiness bottles inside.
One day when her daughters are ten and fifteen years old, Ingrid goes for a swim and never returns. Whether she drowned or deserted remained a public speculation for twelve years, at which point the novel begins.
Twelve years later, her dying and regret-ridden husband believes he has spotted his long-gone wife walking about their coastal village, and the ensuing storyline slowly reveals that there was more to Ingrid’s story than her husband or now-adult daughters had ever known.
Ingrid covertly had left a series of letters in scattered books throughout their literature-swamped home that reveals the truth of her struggles. She addressed each to Gil, her sad story of broken trust, infidelity, domestic discontentment, and miscarriages.
This inspiring woman comes to life through alternating snapshots of these illuminating, dated letters and the present perspectives of her now-grown daughters coming to understand their parents in a new light.
Aside from the brilliant and moving plot line, Claire Fuller’s writing style is an incredibly unique and powerful asset of Swimming Lessons. As an author, Fuller artfully takes a step back from her writing, putting perspective on even her own novel, reminding readers, especially avid ones, that they too have an important place in the process of literature:
The relationship between author and reader is often forgotten, but Fuller humbly reflects that authors wouldn’t exist without readers. Without readers, there would be nobody to dissect and admire a writer’s carefully chosen words and their carefully constructed sentences and plots. Nobody would care; their words would bounce off in the void back at themselves. Fuller draws our attention to the fact that novelists are looking for interaction with readers, that they write with an intention to make a difference in a stranger’s thought pattern.
““Writing does not exist unless there is someone to read it, and each reader will take something different from the novel, from a chapter, from a line...a book becomes a living thing only when it interacts with a reader. What do you think happens in the gaps-the unsaid things, everything you don’t write? The reader fills them from their own imagination. But does each reader fill them how you want, or in the same way? Of course not.””
Claire Fuller’s Swimming Lessons is a celebration of fictional literature as an entity itself. Isn’t it incredible how a fictitious story can change your mind or heart, how something made-up has the ability to alter your perceptions, how you can put down a book and feel like you’ve changed because of what you’ve read? Reading a powerful piece of fiction is like feeling like you’ve been living underwater, and all of a sudden, when encountering it, like you’ve been pulled to the surface and the bright sunlight; it feels a little shocking.
Fuller’s book on books, on authors, on the writing process, on characters living and choosing their own subplots, is remarkable. The multi-level story of this piece of literature is awesome. Swimming Lessons is a book for bookworms, reminding us what good writing does and how it changes us, one book at a time; reminding us why we read: that there is much to discover and learn about language and human relationships; reminding us that writing is about sharing and sparking new ideas.
Swimming Lessons raises fascinating questions on maternal insecurities and family dynamic, exploring very honest and vulnerable parts of being a mother and a wife, the weaknesses and insecurities that are hard to admit to in those roles. Fuller examines what it means to be who you want to be, how life fails to unfold the way you expected, how dreams are left by the wayside, how love can slowly go astray, how your choices inevitably constitute who you become.
You will enjoy this novel if you enjoy novels like Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, with Fuller’s awe-inspiring examination of womanhood, motherhood, and family, and how female identity becomes tied up in all three as time goes by. Every bookworm will thoroughly enjoy this contemplative read!
Excerpt from Swimming Lessons:
““I sometimes think about what the garden would become if I weren’t here to look after it… Is imposing our will on nature wrong? All that work to keep the garden as I want it- the weeding, the pruning, and the mowing. Perhaps it would be more honest, more truthful, to let the land slip back it how it wants to be.””
Readers: How much do we fight the truth of what should be natural and easy for us? How much do we swim against the current?