Swimming Naked

By Stacy Sims

     Lucy Greene is an adult who lives life hard and she avoids emotional attachments and commitments. While Lucy is an attractive, appealing young woman, she has a cynical outlook on life and her life lacks personal relationships. She is neither close to her mother nor her sister, has no girlfriends, and her interactions with men never transcend the occasional sexual fling. Lucy is a heavy smoker, a junk food eater, and a non-exerciser. She simply does not nurture herself or others.

     At the beginning of Swimming Naked, Lucy finds herself navigating unfamiliar emotional territory when she travels south to Florida where her mother is dying in a hospital from a terminal illness. As Lucy sits by her mother's side, her memories go back in time and she revisits a summer vacation in Canada that changed her life forever. There was an accident at their vacation lake house, which apparently led to the subsequent disappearance of her father. After their father left, Lucy and her sister were subject to their mother's whims and desires as to the course their lives would take.

     Lucy holds dear a long-ago memory of a late night "skinny dipping" swim with her mother and that memory helps her survive the ordeal of watching her mother succumb to cancer. Swimming Naked is a story of Lucy's bitterness and hurt over unresolved family issues and how the present, despite devastating circumstances, permits her to let go of some of her pain and to forgive her mother for past transgressions. Swimming Naked is an impressive debut novel, which I highly recommend to fans of literary fiction and women's fiction.