Despite a lifetime of ambivalence about her mother, Fay, thirty-year-old Lucy Greene arrives in overheated Florida to take care of her mother as she lies dying of cancer. In this novel about growth and transformation, Lucy, a hard-living, droll, and self-aware young woman, finds herself in strange, new emotional territory and begins sizing up her life by setting the past against the present.
She shares the story of her family’s history—including the stunning signature events of one fateful summer when a violent storm results in a freak accident that literally shatters her family. Afterward, the father seemingly disappears and the mother and her daughters move forward on a very different course. It is Lucy’s one treasured memory—a midnight swim with her mother—that reminds her there is grace in her graceless world, a fact that helps her to forgive her mother and, ultimately, let her go.
Uplifting but unsentimental, compelling and remarkably moving, Swimming Naked is an unforgettable debut that will resonate with daughters, mothers, and anyone who’s ever searched their past in the hopes of finding a future.
