Swimming in Paris: A Life in Three Stories Audiobook

Quotes

• Colombe Schneck writes with a tenderness and ferocity that’s entirely her own. These overlapping novellas are droll, fearless, and shot through with both romance and dread. Schneck offers a periscopic view into bourgeois Paris and captures the terror and truth of love like only a Frenchwoman can. Each time I read her, I swoon.

  — Pamela Druckerman, New York Times Best-selling author of Bringing Up Bébé

• This is valuable writing. It has immense vitality. You will encounter a female narrator whose direct and bright-eyed stare at the world, and herself, is without shame or faux modesty. At the same time, it is also a deep study of existence, at various ages and stages in life.

  — Deborah Levy, author of Real Estate

• No American could write this, and every American will relish to read it.

  — Lauren Collins, author of When in French

• “This remarkable novel is both universal in its description of women’s friendships, and specific and particular in its insights into the French Bourgeoisie, which has always been utterly inaccessible to the English language reader. The experience of reading this book is both gutting and exhilarating.

  — Ayelet Waldman, author of A Really Good Day

• Colombe Schneck’s work expertly weaves the personal with the political. 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. She fearlessly reflects on the corporeal, how our bodies limit us and set us free. Swimming in Paris is a must read for anyone with curiosity and compassion.

  — Aline McKenna, showrunner and executive producer of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

• Swimming in Paris is a deep and devastating pleasure. 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.

  — Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies

• Universal . . . with grace and hard-won knowledge. No pulled punches here, just truth.

  — Kirkus (starred review)

• Beautiful . . . a gorgeous meditation on the vagaries of being alive.

  — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

• A dreamy, bruised, and carnal book that pretty much no American would write and pretty much every American will relish reading.

  — Lauren Collins, author of When in French

• “This remarkable novel is both universal in its description of women’s friendships, and specific and particular in its insights into the French Bourgeoisie, which has always been utterly inaccessible to the English language reader. The experience of reading this book is both gutting and exhilarating.

  — Ayelet Waldman, author of A Really Good Day“The ‘movements’ of Swimming in Paris thrum with life, sparkle with insight. It was an exhilarating read. I’ve never encountered a more perfect depiction of how the world shrinks when you understand that you’re a ‘girl’, rather than a ‘person’. With this book, Colombe Schneck became my Claire Parnet.

• For Schneck, what’s unadorned is freer, and pure weightless freedom is not only possible but also the highest imaginable achievement . . . in the pool . . . Schneck learned to dispel her illusions, quiet her anxieties, and write with stunning directness.

  — Madeline Crum, Los Angeles Review of Books

• Sinewy, tough, sharp . . . evocative, stylist, direct . . . In some sense, this memoir is for people who are the tiniest bit tired of memoir. It gives one the feeling of greater understanding, a sudden, expansive view from the top of a hill. Even though Schneck works at a scale that is deliberately small, insistently concrete, and extremely lean, her writing somehow exposes whole vistas of the female experience.

  — Katie Roiphe, The Atlantic

• Smart, candid . . . It’s not heartbreak that makes Schneck’s story so moving; it’s her exact honesty on all aspects of love and intimacy. A deep dive into female life.

  — Leigh Newman, Oprah Daily