Here are 79 books that Swimming for My Life fans have personally recommended if you like
Swimming for My Life.
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I resonate with these stories; I feel a kinship with authors of books about teen sexual abuse. My heart breaks for another innocent young person, and I am also inspired by the different ways we find healing and peace. I am so grateful for my healing journey that I want to share what helped me with others who are looking for greater peace with their struggles and scars. I am proud to join the ranks of these authors because we all shine a spotlight on the harm done by this too-common abuse of the trust and innocence of teenage girls.
I like this book because it takes on the troubling theme of consent in the case where one person is an adolescent and the other a significantly older adult. I think in all cases of this power dynamic, the confusion a young person feels when she is eager for the love and attention of the older man blurs the meaning of consent for her.I know it did for me.
Yet the truth is a young teenager isn’t capable of consent; she is unaware of the price she’ll pay for what seems like love but is actually abuse. When the perpetrator is a well-liked or respected leader, like a coach or teacher, the confusion is worse because we are all led to believe this is a trustworthy person.
The devastating and powerful memoir from a French publisher who was abused by a famous writer from the age of thirteen
'Dazzling' New York Times
'A gut-punch of a memoir with prose that cuts like a knife' Kate Elizabeth Russell, author of My Dark Vanessa
Thirty years ago, Vanessa Springora was the teenage muse of one of France's most celebrated writers, a footnote in the narrative of an influential man. At the end of 2019, as women around the world began to speak out, Springora, now in her forties and the director of one of France's leading publishing houses, decided…
I resonate with these stories; I feel a kinship with authors of books about teen sexual abuse. My heart breaks for another innocent young person, and I am also inspired by the different ways we find healing and peace. I am so grateful for my healing journey that I want to share what helped me with others who are looking for greater peace with their struggles and scars. I am proud to join the ranks of these authors because we all shine a spotlight on the harm done by this too-common abuse of the trust and innocence of teenage girls.
I resonated with this memoir of teen grooming because I saw myself in it and I felt less alone, like I had found a kindred spirit. Many details of our stories are different, but the core wounding from being taken advantage of by an older more powerful man felt the same.
The author and I both experienced the thrill of being chosen and the deep sadness resulting from this kind of betrayal, and we both found a way to heal, even though the scars remain.
AS FEATURED IN THE HULU DOCUMENTARY KEEP THIS BETWEEN US
A dark relationship evolves between a high schooler and her English teacher in this breathtakingly powerful memoir about a young woman who must learn to rewrite her own story.
“Have you ever read Lolita?”
So begins seventeen-year-old Alisson’s metamorphosis from student to lover and then victim. A lonely and vulnerable high school senior, Alisson finds solace only in her writing—and in a young, charismatic English teacher, Mr. North.
Mr. North gives Alisson a copy of Lolita to read, telling her it is a beautiful story about love. The book soon…
I resonate with these stories; I feel a kinship with authors of books about teen sexual abuse. My heart breaks for another innocent young person, and I am also inspired by the different ways we find healing and peace. I am so grateful for my healing journey that I want to share what helped me with others who are looking for greater peace with their struggles and scars. I am proud to join the ranks of these authors because we all shine a spotlight on the harm done by this too-common abuse of the trust and innocence of teenage girls.
This memoir depicts not only the manipulative and abusive relationship the author had with her coach but includes the excruciating experience of confronting her later in life and going through the process of prosecution.
As a reader, I felt Kristen’s confusion and despair as a young teenager, as well as her mixed emotions as she pursued justice and closure for years of suffering. My story never involved confrontation or litigation because my teacher passed away before I understood how he had hurt me. I ached for how hard this was for Kim and rejoiced at her eventual liberation.
Raised in the idyllic and close-knit northern California town of Moraga, Kristen Lewis Cunnane had it all at 12: a treasured family, close friends, a valued position on a variety of sports teams, and excellent grades. By any pre-teen’s standards, hers was certainly a life to envy.
Unfortunately, this happiness was to be short-lived as Kristen suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her middle school science teacher. Afraid to discuss the event with her parents or close friends, Kristen turned to a trusted female coach and teacher for guidance. When they first met, Julie Correa was seemingly the perfect…
I resonate with these stories; I feel a kinship with authors of books about teen sexual abuse. My heart breaks for another innocent young person, and I am also inspired by the different ways we find healing and peace. I am so grateful for my healing journey that I want to share what helped me with others who are looking for greater peace with their struggles and scars. I am proud to join the ranks of these authors because we all shine a spotlight on the harm done by this too-common abuse of the trust and innocence of teenage girls.
Like me, Wendy’s parents weren’t paying close enough attention to her during her formative teenage years. This makes us vulnerable and, therefore, good targets for teachers or coaches to prey upon our availability and eagerness to be seen. This combination of parental absence and the betrayal of innocence and trust by an adult ‘friend’ who seduces us into a sexual relationship has a huge impact on our later years.
In Wendy’s case, their shared love of writing makes their relationship more complex. In my case, the 1970s was a time of ‘free love’ and sexual liberation, which added further confusion to my limited understanding of right and wrong.
Wendy C. Ortiz was an only child and a bookish, insecure girl living with alcoholic parents in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her relationship with a charming and deeply flawed private school teacher 15 years her senior appeared to give her the kind of power teenagers wish for, regardless of consequences. Her teacher - now a registered sex offender - continually encouraged her passion for writing while making her promise she was not leaving any written record about their dangerous sexual relationship. This conflicted relationship with her teacher may have been…
For most of my life I’ve been both a writer and a swimmer. I’ve engaged in both activities for many decades, but I’ve always kept the two entirely separate. Write about swimming? Why? What would I say? What was there to say about water and the act of moving through it? It seemed to me that it was a case of “you have to be there,” that writing about swimming would be too removed from the immediacy, the tactility, the floating state of mind. It was only when I discovered works by some truly great writers that I began to see that I could write about my own love of being in water, and how I might go about it.
Lynne Cox is one of the world’s most extraordinary distance swimmers, and she’s also a remarkable writer. In this, her first book, she writes about her emotional connection to water, her spiritual need to swim, as well as recounting the many challenges she faced in her successful crossing of the Bering Strait – not the least of which was the 38F water temperature. I was truly honored when Lynne agreed to write a testimonial for my book.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this extraordinary book, the world’s most extraordinary distance swimmer writes about her emotional and spiritual need to swim and about the almost mystical act of swimming itself.
Lynne Cox trained hard from age nine, working with an Olympic coach, swimming five to twelve miles each day in the Pacific. At age eleven, she swam even when hail made the water “like cold tapioca pudding” and was told she would one day swim the English Channel. Four years later—not yet out of high school—she broke the men’s and women’s world records for the Channel swim. In 1987,…
As a practicing pagan, and nature writer, I write books about how to reconnect to nature, how to rediscover and connect to your inner self, and your sense of spirituality. I grew up in the wilds of a large national park (Dartmoor) and have found that this colours and shapes everything I do. I spent thirty years living and working in London, and missed Dartmoor every day I was away. Whilst living in the city I had to learn ways to connect to nature, which is how I discovered my spiritual path. I was lucky enough to stage an escape and return home at forty-seven, and have been writing about it ever since.
I love this book as I used it as a road map of swimming adventures when I moved back home to the West Country after thirty years of living in the city.
I was faced with the challenge of not knowing where to swim, as we didn’t really go in the water when I was a child. The author visits a plethora of favourite swimming spots with a group of friends, and I felt like I was accompanying them on their trips.
I was able to use the book as a guide, to go and visit all the spots Lynne Roper mentions in her diaries, safe in the knowledge I was visiting places that people have swum in for years.
My
novels explore women whose contributions to culture have been relegated to the
footnotes of mainstream history books, and in few areas have women been more
overlooked than in sports. Because of the achievements of today’s female
athletes, ranging from the many athletic opportunities available to our young
daughters to the professional success of women like Serena Williams, it’s easy
to think that progress for women’s sports has come a long way—and in many ways, it has, thanks to legislative protections like Title IX—but these achievements reflect
over a century’s worth of sacrifice by many unheralded women athletes. Here are
five books that highlight this journey.
These days Gertrude Ederle is unfamiliar to many of us, but a century ago she was an athletic champion whose celebrity rivaled Babe Ruth’s. In 1926, two years after winning three medals at the Paris Olympics, she became the first woman to swim the English Channel, an amazing feat of endurance and perseverance that took 14 hours and 37 minutes, a time almost two hours faster than the speediest of the five men who had gone before her. Along with recreating Ederle’s harrowing Channel journey in vivid detail, renowned sportswriter Glenn Stout infuses life back into Ederle and shows us why President Coolidge called her “America’s Best Girl.”
The exhilarating true story of Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel, and inspire a "wave of confidence and emancipation" for women in sports (Parade).
By age twenty, at the height of the Jazz Age, Trudy Ederle was the most accomplished swimmer in the world. She'd won Olympic gold and set a host of world records. But the greatest challenge remained: the English Channel. Only a few swimmers, none of them women, had ever made the treacherous twenty-one mile crossing. Trudy's failed first attempt seemed to confirm what many naysayers believed: No woman could possibly accomplish such…
I’m someone who feels everything deeply and longs for a kinder, healthier world for everyone. A humane educator and diverse books advocate, I’m drawn to true stories that inspire compassion, inclusivity, and taking action in our own unique ways to make a difference. My nonfiction picture books—including Winged Wonders, Cougar Crossing, Ocean Soup, Make Way for Animals!, So Much More To Helen, and more— focus on “solutionaries” who help people, animals, and the planet. They’ve won Golden Kite and Eureka! Nonfiction Honor Awards, starred reviews, and spots on best books lists.
I was bowled over by Yusra Mardini’s powerful story when I heard it during the 2016 Olympics, when she was a swimmer on the global Refugee team. As Yusra and her sister were fleeing war-torn Syria and their boat began to sink, the 17-year-old did what she knew how to do best—swim—to help save the lives of everyone aboard. In sparse but powerful words and art, this book shows American children so much about the refugee experience, through a teenager whose life probably looked very much like their own before war struck her country, and who stepped up and saved others with her skill while at risk herself.
Yusra Mardini loves to swim. Growing up in Damascus, she is just a girl with a dream: to swim for her country in the Olympic Games. But when war erupts in her country, she is forced to flee.
In spare, rhyming verse, Yursa Swims tells the true story of one girl's journey from her beloved home in Syria to Germany.
We follow her to the Turkish coast, where she boards a small, crowded boat across the Aegean Sea to Greece. When the boat begins to sink, Yusra swims, helping…
If you want to live your best life, you’ll need to face some fears. I’ve faced a lot of my fears: great white sharks, sky-diving, caves, spiders, meat sauces. I’m still scared, but what else can I do? Stay in bed my whole life? I love writing and illustrating for kids. It’s how I’ve spent the last twenty years. I’ve written and/or illustrated almost fifty books. The scariest part is figuring out how to start. Thinking of an ending is scary too. Then there’s all that stuff in the middle. Ugh! My first books about facing fears were Hippo and Rabbit. Now, Scaredy Cats. Fear gives me ideas!
I feel like I lived this story as a kid. I’ll bet a lot of kids do. A young boy overcomes his fear of the high dive.
Step by step, Gaia Cornwall takes us through Jabari’s jump. Jabari starts by telling his dad he’s not scared at all. He clearly is. He delays, makes excuses. Dad never pushes. He wants this to be Jabari’s decision, Jabari’s victory. It’s so relatable, the perspective even changes to first person once Jabari is high above the pool.
Everything rings true. It’s exactly what a scared kid would say and do. It’s exactly what I said and did when I was Jabari’s age trying to summon my own courage on the high dive. Except when I hit the water, my swim trunks fell off.
Working up the courage to take a big, important leap is hard, but Jabari is almost absolutely ready to make a giant splash.
In a sweet tale of overcoming your fears, debut author-illustrator Gaia Cornwall captures a moment at the swimming pool between a patient and encouraging father and a determined little boy you can't help but root for. Jabari is definitely ready to jump off the diving board. He's finished his swimming lessons and passed his swimming test, and he's a great jumper, so he's not scared at all. "Looks easy," says Jabari, watching the other kids take their…
I’ve been reading almost exclusively memoirs and personal essays for over a decade. The women who generously wrote about their bodies—the bowels, the breasts, the bad sex—lit up the path for me when I was drowning in my own body shame and body confusion. Every year I read at least 50 memoirs, and the ones on this list are the ones I revisit over and over. I also study writing with Lidia Yuknavitch at Corporeal Writing, where I first heard six years ago that “the body has a point of view.” I love this as a writer and a reader. So much of women’s bodies and experiences has been hidden away or unstoried, but those days are coming to a close, and these writers are leading the way.
Yuknavitch’s memoir is a gloves-off gut-punch of stories about her life as a competitive swimmer, a daughter of a tyrannical father, and an artist-in-the-making. Best of all: The sex scenes are like nothing I’ve ever read. DO NOT MISS THIS ONE.
From the debris of her troubled early life, Lidia Yuknavitch weaves an astonishing tale of survival. A kind of memoir that is also a paean to the pursuit of beauty, self-expression, desire - for men and women - and the exhilaration of swimming, The Chronology of Water lays a life bare.
It is a life that navigates, and transcends, abuse, addiction, self-destruction and the crushing loss of a stillborn child. It is the life of a misfit, one that forges a fierce and untrodden path to creativity and comes together in the shape of love.
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