As we head to breakfast near her West Village apartment, Leanne Shapton has a pressing question. “Does the cover look too feminine?”
She had received mixed reviews from friends of the cover art for her new personal history, Swimming Studies, which shows a cerulean blue swimming cap; those who know swimming, she explained, know that only girls wear caps.
For a writer, Ms. Shapton, 39, is unusually concerned with the aesthetic: her new book uses illustrations of swimming pools in thick blue brushstrokes and photographs of bathing suits to evoke her youth as a serious swimmer in natatoriums across her native Canada. Her book cannot truly be called a memoir: “I hate the word memoir, because I don’t think this book tells the cohesive story of my life,” she told The Observer. “So I had to figure out how to talk about my life and I always thought in landscapes.” Like the photography books she edits for her publishing company, J & L Books, Swimming Studies uses images to illustrate memories.
And her visual art has heretofore been Ms. Shapton’s claim to fame. She was formerly the art-director of The New York Times Op-Ed page; her best-known book so far may be Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry, a faux auction catalog using intricately staged photographs to document the decline of a relationship; the female model in the book’s photos was pal, and now novelist-of-the-moment, Sheila Heti.
Fans and friends are easily drawn into Ms. Shapton’s orbit; few of the season’s memoirists have likely had essays written about them in W describing the author’s “girl crush.” The book party for Swimming Studies (at Le Bain, naturally) featured on-land synchronized swimmers Ms. Shapton had discovered at a taping of This American Life—“If a book could have a video epigraph, I would have used them,” she told us—as well as savory donuts, fitting the book’s subtheme of swimmers’ carbo-loading, and a carefully calibrated guest list. (Hello there, Jennifer Egan!)
Girls star Zosia Mamet showed up in a crop top and parachute pants. “I just discovered her art two months ago and sort of stalked her!” she told The Observer. “She was very amiable and super friendly and let me come over to her house and showed me all her stuff after I emailed her and said ‘I love your stuff!’ I was there for hours—so long.”
Ms. Shapton speaks modestly about her talent. “I wish I were a graphic novelist, so I could draw me, but I can’t draw anything more than once. I like the way those stories flow because of how much is left out.” The elisions in Swimming Studies are not merely visual; they’re also narrative. “I don’t have vivid memories of the Olympic trials, or of winning medals,” she writes. What she does remember: the food she ate after practices (anything containing a carbohydrate is, for her, a madeleine), the midnight drives across Canada, the faces of her competitors. “I still look at these 12-year-olds’ faces,” she said of her own paintings in the book, “and I’m like, ‘Ahh, fuck her! That girl is so scary, so fast!’”
Reviewing tennis star Tracy Austin’s memoir, David Foster Wallace memorably wrote that the elite athlete must “be blind and dumb about it,” must fundamentally lack the propensity for introversion. (With the Olympics upon us, how many interviews will we be subjected to this summer by an uncomprehending Ryan Lochte or Michael Phelps?) Was it the artist in Ms. Shapton that held her back as an athlete?
“I was never an elite athlete,” she replied. “If I’d gone to the Olympics, that’d be one thing, but me getting eighth?” (Her national ranking peaked at eight, and, she notes early in the book, she never placed in the Olympic trials.) “The story is not actually remarkable in a linear way. I don’t think I’m capable of that. I’m not interested in a lot of parts of myself.”
She’s more interested in documenting the world around her. Near the beginning of Swimming Studies, she lists the stresses weighing on eight lanes of swimmers waiting for a race to begin. They’re all composite portraits—Ms. Shapton would never sell out a past competitors’ personal drama, and besides, she’s lost touch with her old swimming cohort. “I was a little bit of an outsider,” she said. “These are girls with Olympic rings on their clothes and Sharpied on their arms! They wore it on their sleeve. And I think you should. I couldn’t—I was a real introvert. I was really interested in art, and there was a lot of stuff I couldn’t talk about. I’m sure I came off as aloof and weird, but I felt like I was on the outside looking in.”
Being on the outside looking in will come in handy in a few weeks, however, when she’s covering the London Olympics for the Canadian press. As an observer of sports, she likes the emotional moments. “Athletes can be really sterile and really straight. Especially in North America, they’re told they should be heroes. But I love it when Serena Williams loses her shit. It’s so honest. I love McEnroe. I love little signs of life that show how hard it is to do what they do.” Ms. Shapton doesn’t lose her shit in Swimming Studies, but she does quit the swimming scene prematurely, decamping to McGill University in Montreal (where she joined the swim team, at a much less competitive level) and then to New York, where she interned at Saturday Night Live and Harper’s and left swimming for good. “I was like, ‘Culture! Gimme culture!’ And I was doing and reading everything, and being really pretentious about it.” As a swimmer, she had designed a shirt for her team, emblazoned with “Veni Vidi Vici”; the praise she received for it meant more at the time, she said, than the swimming medals.
Not that competitive swimming didn’t help her navigate the waters of New York’s creative world. “It gave her a sense of discipline that she’s since applied to her creative endeavours,” said Ms. Shapton’s husband, James Truman, the former editorial director at Condé Nast. “She chose to leave swimming for a broader canvas.
“She has a lot more self-discipline than I do. She decides what she wants to do, and however winding the path is, she does it. I imagine that’s similar to the drive of an athlete.” Mr. Truman added that on their first vacation together, Ms. Shapton challenged him to a race in the pool.
“I came in second.”
Swimming, she seems to acknowledge, made her able to cultivate a spiky individuality—one that her work now allows her to indulge. Participating in the sport fed her creativity by being a foil to it. “Because you’re doing something so boring and repetitive—to survive, you had to be yourself. You’re in pain with other people for four hours a day! When you’re doing something this intense, you can’t fake it.” It was only after some years of separation from the pool, however, that she was able to reset some of her relationships. “I was realizing that female competition is a mess. I’ve kind of grown out of it and I just trust women in a way I didn’t when I was a teenager. I regret that I didn’t. When I love a friend I really do love a friend, and I feel like I missed out on it when I was younger.”
Having been in the heat of that competition, she is well-qualified to generalize about sport. “Athletes are set up to be so conventional,” she said. “None of us are that conventional. We’re all weirdos.”
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