Everything We Lose: Reckoning with Athletic Girlhood

[Swimmer Girl with Butterfly, c. 1991]

Everything We Lose is a researched memoir about falling in love, failing, quitting, and returning, but on different terms, to something I was almost good enough in, and about the grief of that almost. I was a nationally-ranked competitive swimmer, then it all fell apart when I was 17. I quit and didn’t reckon with any of it, what it had all meant. Years later, when my grandmother died, I inherited my family’s athletic archive, with all its obsessive records of my grandfather’s and my mother’s elite athletic careers in the Soviet Union. My book is my much overdue excavation of my family’s tangled up athletic past and my own athletic girlhood. Structured around the phases of the freestyle stroke (catch, pull, finish, recovery), Everything We Lose tells stories about sports running like blood through a family; the trauma of immigration and the refuge of sports; the particular gendered experience of athletic girlhood and the athletic mother-daughter bond; wanting so badly to be great but being first only good, then not good enough; and athletic experience as a deeply sensory way to dwell in our warming, damaged, wild world. Ultimately, Everything We Lose is a bittersweet love letter to swimming, family, and home.