My Weight in Water

A powerful exploration of race and swimming by a writer who "see[s] the world whole, allowing daily intimacies against a backdrop of social injustice" (New York Times). Michael Kleber-Diggs and his twin brother, Martin, grew up in Kansas City, their family part of a prosperous community of Black medical professionals. Their father had never learned to swim, so when he wanted to buy a boat, their mother, a former lifeguard, agreed on the condition that her sons take swimming lessons. Then their father was murdered in an act of random violence, and everyone's lives changed--but for Michael, in the years and moves that followed, swimming remained a constant. My Weight in Water is the intimate memoir of a swimmer. It is a story of race and recreation in America--of segregation, desegregation, and justice--told through one family and their lives in the Midwest. It is a reckoning with the concept of self-care and a plea for joy. Most of all, it is a book about what it means to love an activity that leaves you vulnerable--your mostly unclothed body in close proximity to other mostly unclothed bodies, moving through the same water--when you are marked as an outsider by both your race and your size. Transparently and gloriously written, My Weight in Water is a definitively American work about what it costs one swimmer to enter the pool and why he does it anyway--imagining a future where all people have access to an activity that renders us weightless.