
- 176 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
"A memoir for our times." âMichael Stipe "A coming-of-age drama captured through poetic prose and convincing honesty." â Kirkus Reviews "I swim for every chance to get wastedâafter every meet, every weekend, every travel trip. This is what I look forward to and what I tell no one: the burn of it down my throat, to my soul curled up in my lungs, the sharpest pain all over itâit seizes and stretches, becoming alive again, and is the only thing that makes sense." At fifteen, Casey Legler is already one of the fastest swimmers in the world. She is also an alcoholic, isolated from her family, and incapable of forming lasting connections with those around her.Driven to compete at the highest levels, sent far away from home to train with the best coaches and teams, she finds herself increasingly alone and alienated, living a life of cheap hotels and chlorine-worn skin, anonymous sexual encounters and escalating drug use. Even at what should be a moment of triumphâcompeting at age sixteen in the 1996 Olympicsâshe is an outsider looking in, procuring drugs for Olympians she hardly knows, and losing her race after setting a new world record in the qualifying heats.After submitting to years of numbing training in France and the United States, Casey can see no way out of the sinister loneliness that has swelled and festered inside her. Yet wondrously, when it is almost too late, she discovers a small light within herself, and senses a point of calm within the whirlwind of her life.In searing, evocative, visceral prose, Casey gives language to loneliness in this startling story of survival, defiance, and of the embers that still burn when everything else in us goes dark.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Dedication
- Authorâs Note: A Small History in Autism Spectrum Disorder
- Genesis
- War
- Olympus
- Prelude
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Copyright
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