The lure of a life of laps and limits

MEMOIR: Swimming Studies By Leanne Shapton Particular Books, 320pp. £20THIS MEMOIR DEALS with limitations, both the ones we set for ourselves and the ones set by our own ability, and how they protect, define, comfort and constrain us.

Leanne Shapton devoted her teenage years to serious competitive swimming, reaching Canada’s Olympic trials in 1988 and 1992. Throughout her teens, her life was dictated by the sport’s demands. “I practised five or six hours a day, six days a week, eating and sleeping as much as possible in between. Weekends were spent either training or competing. I wasn’t the best . . . I trained, ate, travelled and showered with the best in the country, but wasn’t the best; I was pretty good.” And she swam, always, in strict, straight lines.

Twenty years later, now an illustrator and designer as well as a writer (she’s responsible for the cover of Irish author Paul Murray’s bestselling Skippy Dies), Shapton still dreams of swimming “at least three nights a week”. In this beautifully written, melancholy book, she looks back at her life in the “insular, clammy, circumscribed and largely underexposed” world of competitive swimming, and shows how her life as a young swimmer fed into her life as an adult artist.

“Artistic discipline and athletic discipline are kissing cousins,” she writes. “They require the same thing, an unspecial practice: tedious and pitch-black invisible, private as guts, but always sacred.” Serious swimming involved sticking to a rigid routine and practising the same thing over and over; developing her skills as an artist requires a similar devotion. She writes eloquently and insightfully about the relationship between natural talent and hard labour, and how the former is meaningless without the latter: “We [swimmers] defined ourselves as special [but] the limitations of that specialness requires doing a series of very unspecial things, very well, a million times over, so that one special thing might happen, maybe, much later.” The same is true of her life drawing in college.

As Shapton grows older, she seems to hanker after the routine and structure required in her teens, both professionally and personally. She still swims, but unlike her husband, James, she dislikes swimming in open water. She finds the sea unsettling: “I compare my comfort in swimming pools to my discomfort in open water and my contentedness with solitude to my anxieties in close company. I think about limits, how easy life can be when it’s limited, how manageable. Limits appeal to my controlling nature.”

As the narrative drifts between different stages of Shapton’s life, we see her struggle with her attitude to swimming. Visits to Hampstead Heath’s pond and a Scandinavian swimming place where everyone is naked see her trying (and almost succeeding) to enjoy the water in a different way, to relax and enjoy the freedom of doing whatever you want in it. When she sees James romp in the waves, she realises that “he doesn’t see life as rigour and desperation. To him it’s something to enjoy, where the focus is not on how to win, but how to flourish . . . James introduces me to the idea of bathing”. And, the reader might find herself thinking, not before time. For many of us, swimming is liberating and joyful. But in Swimming Studies, swimming never seems like fun. It seems like work.

Unsurprisingly, Shapton is drawn to the aesthetics of swimming, and goggles and suits as well as the tracksuit bottoms (always grey) and Club Monaco sweatshirts of her 1980s youth are beautifully described. The text is broken up by pages of her artwork – a series of evocative watercolour images of swimmers, the blues and greys running into each other in a watery blur; portraits of her teenage teammates, from Aidan (“Aidan gives me his U2 War T-shirt, unlaundered, and I keep it that way”) to Renata (the prettiest girl on the team); a valley painted in Matisse-bright colours.

There is also a witty yet strangely moving sequence of photographs of Shapton’s mostly vintage swimsuits, presented with captions detailing where they were purchased, and where and how they were worn (“Vintage blue and white floral printed cotton suit, no label, used for recreational swimming, 2006-2009. Purchased at Portobello Market, London. Worn first in the infinity pool at Babington House, Somerset. James proposed in the pool”). She may have stopped swimming competitively, but she is still measuring out her life in swimsuits.

Shapton’s brother Derek was also a serious swimmer, and it feels like the family’s life revolved around the pool. What makes the book so moving is the way in which Shapton captures the distance and the closeness between who she is now and who she was then, and how a part of her sometimes wants to go back. At one point in her late 30s, she enters a swimming competition and, when loading up on carbs beforehand, feels “a pang of longing for the world I knew instinctively, the one I started eating spaghetti in”. She sees the kitchen in her childhood home, the seatbelt in her mother’s car in which she rode to all those practices.

The book can be a little precious, and there are times when the dispassionate tone and careful attention to aesthetics made me envision an annoyingly deadpan character in a Sofia Coppola film. But whenever it threatens to become too solipsistic, there will be an image or a line that catches the heart and pulls back the reader.

Swimming Studies is a book about swimming, and a book about art, and a book about what it’s like to be really good at something, at least for a while. But perhaps most of all it’s a book about growing up, about saying goodbye to childhood, a period of strictly defined limits in which life is as carefully constrained as the lanes of a swimming pool, a time when we live without the delirious, terrifying possibility of choice.

Anna Carey’s debut novel, The Real Rebecca, won the Senior Children’s Book of the Year prize at the 2011 Irish Book Awards. Her second novel, Rebecca’s Rules, will be published in September