Swimming in Paris: A Life in Three Stories

From the award-winning and best-selling French author, a woman 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, to build up my strength and use it in the right doses. My body, by showing me who I was, allowed me to become fully myself.

In “Seventeen,” “Friendship,” and “Swimming,” 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 or the nuance of a long friendship or a mid-life 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.