Swimming Lessons By Claire Fuller

 

Swimming Lessons

By Claire Fuller

In 1979, Ingrid meets and falls in love with her writing teacher, Gil. The two are driven from the school because of their affair; Gil is fired and Ingrid is told she can not finish her degree because she is pregnant.

Ingrid moves in with Gil and their hippy life of partying is interrupted as Ingrid faces the reality of becoming a mother and Gil's lack of producing any writing that can support them. The couple slowly come apart after Nan is born and the two try unsuccessfully to have more babies. But they are both harboring secrets. Gil is having affairs in his writing room behind the house (called the Swimming Pavilion), while Ingrid secretly hides the fact that she doesn't feel any sort of love for her child, and doesn't believe she ever will.

During one pregnancy, a boy is born and does not live, but he is the one child Ingrid feel a strong motherly bond with. Afterward, she never does again, despite the birth of Flora some time later. Through diary entries in the early 1990s Ingrid explains to Gil, through a series of letters she hides in books she hopes he will discover, the secrets she is hiding and what she knows about her husband. How his disloyalty and the way he treats her leads her to desert the family.

Interwoven with these stories is Flora's narrative when she is called back to her childhood home by Nan to be with their father, whose health is failing and who is harboring secrets. She returns and finds that she is faced with a father who is not as perfect as she always believed and that she has to come to terms with their "missing" mother and the way she felt about her all her life. Theirs was a combative relationship, built on heresay and a construction wrought from piecing together fragments as a child. Flora realizes she had it all wrong. What happened to her mother? What does what she discovers mean for her own life and the relationships she has always held at a distance?

This was a really good story with deftly interwoven points of view. Fuller continues with themes of loss, isolation, and families falling apart amidst lies and deception in Swimming Lessons. It is a well-written book with heartbreaking characters and a simmering plot with a twist I didn't see coming. I give it 4 stars.