Yahoo Lifestyle These Sports Books Get the Gold — Put Them at the Top of Your Olympics Reading List (Exclusive)
Author and former professional soccer player Georgia Cloepfil recommends the best novels and memoirs about women in sports
Beyond the particular, the best sports books are books about life. In her book Swimming Studies, Leanne Shapton, asks a question that is relevant to everyone: How do we live with the parts of ourselves that are known intimately only to us, buried in our past? As my professional soccer career wound down, I composed The Striker and the Clock as a means of finding my way toward an answer to this question.
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Here is a list of books I love that center women’s stories as they consider athletics and their bodies in motion. As is often the case when we talk about women’s sports, this list of books highlights uncharted worlds of subculture and they all emphasize in some ways, the life that comes after.
'Swimming Studies' by Leanne Shapton
Shapton is an accomplished writer, editor and currently serves as the art director at the New York Review of Books. But before all of that, she was an almost-Olympic swimmer. This book is a catalog of memories from her time in the pool: smells, coaches, teammates, swimsuits — accompanied by photographs and paintings of swimmers and their accessories. This memoir is a study of the ways that an art practice can intersect with a life of athletic competition.
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'Kick the Latch' by Kathryn Scanlan
So many women's sports stories only exist in the realm of subculture. This is definitely true of life behind the scenes at a horse-racing track. Scanlan’s novel is about a trainer named Sonia, whose character is informed by hours of interviews conducted with the real-life version from Iowa. The book is written as a collection of vignettes, each depicting a moment in Sonia’s career chasing the highs and lows, the grit and the pain, of racing and training horses all across the country.
Scanlan is a master of excavation, and as the book progresses, the images and stories compile to depict an eccentric life in a singular voice.
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'So Many Olympic Exertions' by Anelise Chen
In this novel, a graduate student moves through the grief of losing her friend to suicide by obsessing over what makes athletes persist through struggle. A genre-bending book written like a journal, it blends studious note-taking with memoir and coming-of-age.
In the end, the book upends what we think about goal-oriented motivation and the isolated individual of the athletic figure.
'A Body, Undone' by Christina Crosby
Crosby was not a professional athlete, but she was an ambitiously active person when a biking accident paralyzed her at age 49. In this memoir, she writes of rebuilding her life while coming to understand a new version of her body.
Through it all, she also rejects the redemption narrative and manages to write honestly about suffering and continuance.
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'Headshot' by Rita Bullwinkel
Bullwinkle’s novel follows the structure of an amateur boxing tournament in Reno, Nev., depicting the internal monologue of teenage girls as they compete. Boxing is the perfect sport for this sort of exposé — what do teenage girls think about while they go 1v1 against strangers and rivals in the ring?
We get the melodramas, the pettiness, the real trauma and meaning of the events in their lives. And then we get a flash forward — what will these women be doing and how will boxing manifest in their lives and bodies? Perhaps just as scars on their knuckles, nothing more.
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