From the award-winning and bestselling French author Colombe Schneck, a woman's personal journey through abortion, sex, friendship, love, and swimming. At fifty years old, while taking swimming lessons, I finally realized that my body was not actually as incompetent as I'd thought. My physical gestures had been, until then, small, worried, tense. In swimming I learned to extend them. I saw male bodies swimming beside me, and I swam past them, I was delighted, my breasts got smaller, my uterus stopped working.
My body, by showing me who I was, allowed me to become fully myself. In Swimming in Paris , Colombe Schneck orchestrates a coming-of-age in three movements. Beautiful, masterfully controlled, yet filled with pathos, they invite the reader into a decades-long evolution of sexuality, bodily autonomy, friendship, and loss.
Schneck's prose maintains an unwavering intimacy, whether conjuring a teenage abortion in the midst of a privileged Parisian upbringing, the nuance of a long friendship, or a midlife romance. Swimming in Paris is an immersive, propulsive triptych—fundamentally human in its tender concern for every messy and glorious reality of the body, and deeply wise in its understanding of both desire and of letting go.
No pulled punches here, just truth. Schneck writes of herself at 17, at 30, at 40, at 50 and beyond with an understanding that is enviable. She unhesitatingly invites the reader into her blunt, beautiful, sometimes terrible thoughts, taking us through her triumphs and losses, and in the end reveals an unparalleled strength and empathy for herself as a woman, a friend, a lover, and a writer.
Colombe Schneck writes with bracing intelligence and lucidity; she sees the world, and herself, with hard won clarity. A brave, beautiful, uncommonly tender book about love, death, sex and survival. She deftly examines the cost of pleasure, the loss of adolescence, and the complicated bonds between women. Her writing reminds us of love's ability to transcend death.
