This is another book I heard about through the novelist Ann Patchett and her weekly instagram reading reviews and recommendations. But it's taken me a while to get a copy.

It's an unusual book, a memoir in short chapters interspersed with illustrations of the strangest things, related to being a competitive swimmer but with relevance for many aspects of life.

The foreword, by Rita Bullwinkel, spells out the reach of this book: 'While this book is certainly about swimming, I think it is also a book about fashion, class, class mobility, art-making, motherhood, what it means to be a child, what it means to be an artist, what it means to have loved many people and what it means to have a life where you've, like the greatest athletes, "[died] twice".'

The author presents snatched memories of growing up, seeking to be a champion swimmer. It gives intriguing, behind-the-scenes details of training regimes and nutritional concerns. They wear two or three swimsuits on top of each other in training to add drag in the water.

She explains how pain is managed and overcome - for example, breast-strokers have knee problems so ice regularly and take eight aspirin a day.

Food becomes an obsession and she liked to eat spaghetti and meatballs cold for breakfast and would sneak downstairs in the middle of the night to have a soup-spoonful of sugar.

Later in life, she observes how her partner has a different attitude to life than her: 'he doesn't see life as rigor or deprivation. To him it's something to enjoy, where the focus is not on how to win, but how to flourish.'

It's an intriguing, mesmorising book and not least for the images which intersperse the beautiful, sparse writing. The author is also an artist and there are watercolours (all in blue) of the swimmers she has known. There are 70 blue shapes depicting the different swimming pools she's experienced. There are colour patches representing smells she remembers! And there are photos of swimsuits she's worn.

It's inventive, quirky, clever and very interesting. A surprising book, which I found myself turning back to long after I'd finished the final page.