Godspeed
A Memoir
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- ¥1,800
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- ¥1,800
発行者による作品情報
“A memoir for our times.” —Michael Stipe
“A coming-of-age drama captured through poetic prose and convincing honesty.” —Kirkus Reviews
“I swim for every chance to get wasted—after 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 it—it 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 triumph—competing at age sixteen in the 1996 Olympics—she 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Olympic swimmer Legler's intense memoir delves into her experience of depression and substance abuse. Legler tells of her nomadic childhood and adolescence, which spanned continents and countries, taking readers from her native France to Sweden, where she trained and competed, and then back to France, where she first began drinking as a 14-year-old hoping to escape the torturous rigors of swim practice. Legler writes, "My sigh resigns itself to the workout and, shoulders slumped, I turn around to face my lane and the water and the far-off wall at the other end of it. I try to hope that it'll be one of those practices where my brain lifts out of my body and I can't tell I'm swimming." Legler succinctly captures her descent into alcohol and drug addiction: the incessant monotony of it, the cycles of escape and crash: "I sniff that magic up my nose and don't go down for days and instead feel the weight of the empty ghost truck on idle settle in the middle of my chest." For her senior year of high school, she moved to Miami, and then moved to Tucson, Ariz., for college in 1995, where she fell deeper into the pit of addiction while winning more medals. The raw effect of the prose lingers, as when Legler describes getting her period as "feeling the blood gulp out of me." At age 19, she competed in the 1996 Summer Olympics where she placed 10th in the 4 100-meter relay; she eventually went into rehab, quit swimming in her early 20s, and now models. This is a raw story of teenage addiction, and it's beautifully told.