The History of Swimming: A Memoir

I loved this book. I was sad when it was over. It's about a special sibling relationship, addiction and compulsion to try to fix the problem. A very unique story.

Named Kim and Tim by their twelve-year-old brother Porky (wise parents vetoed Porky's first choice of Joe Bob for Tim) the Powers twins were separated in birth by only five minutes. They grew up together, attended the same college, and in many ways were inseparable, even once giving each other the same book, THE HABIT OF BEING, Flannery O'Connor's letters, for birthday gifts. ("Twins always know.") They also, as well as their older brother Porky, eventually figure out that they are gay. ("What was it in the water we drank as children?") Tim, however, becomes a suicidal alcoholic; Kim goes to graduate school in the East and becomes successful-- at least professionally. Much of this unflinchingly honest memoir is about Kim's attempts to find his suicidal brother when Kim learns that Tim has not shown up for work and has disappeared. Powers intersperses throughout the book his brother Tim's letters ("my older brother [Porky] taught me to swim when I was five years old"), letting his brother's own voice speak of his nervous breakdown, his sorrows, his craziness, but also his joy: ("Keep remembering. Keep coming out. Write. Live. Love. It's yours to do.") Although Mr. Powers can be at times a bit tedious and self-indulgent, his prose is as transparent as the water about which he writes so eloquently. I almost didn't finish this book. That would have been my great loss for the last 30 or so pages of this memoir will break your heart; they contain so much sadness but so much more love. I confess I cannot be objective about this book. I too am a twin (being forever the older by 15 minutes) and see so much of my brother and me in these two men: never being photographed alone as children, being forever "the twins," should we live to be a hundred (At least we were not saddled with rhyming first names), and knowing that we are in many ways so close and love each other so much, yet so different as my twin is straight. The New York Times listed THE HISTORY OF SWIMMING as one of the notable nonfiction books of 2006, an honor it richly deserves.

The book is about what it means to be a twin, a brother, a survivor -- when your twin, who you love as dearly as you love yourself, is out of control. It was so moving, I had to stop periodically to have a good cry. Beautifully written.

Sibling relationships can be very difficult - especially close ones. Not being a twin, I can't relate to the whole "twin" thing, but I can relate to loving, hating and competing with my sister - all at the same time. What I love about this book is that it is so clear about portraying humanity - gifts and flaws at the same time. While Tim is a gifted writer and I loved reading his letters, it's easy to see how he would have driven Kim insane. I disagree with the previous reviewer re: the letters - I thought they were one of the best parts of the book. I agree that there are a couple of slow spots, but I really really liked the book.

As the story begins, Kim Powers receives a call from the boss of his twin brother Tim, reporting that he has not reported to work and appears to be missing. After dealing with such instances most of his life, Kim at 28 is tiring of his role as big brother (he is five minutes older) and caretaker to his identical twin, who suffers from bouts of chronic depression and tends to substance abuse and suicide attempts. Kim and Tim were essentially raised by their older brother, "Porky", no thanks to their alcoholic, abusive father and a mother whose mental illness eventually led to suicide when the twins were seven. All three boys grew up to be gay, although their sexual orientation is not an intergral part of the story. Following college, which was perhaps the most stable time of the twins' lives, Kim and Tim moved from their native Texas to Manhattan, not living together but continuing to be an intergral part of each others' lives. Kim was attuned to his brother's fragile emotions and tried to be there for him as much as possible, eventually resenting the intrusion on his own life and the impact on his own mental health. Knowing that Tim had seemed to be getting worse and worse before his disappearance, Kim imagines the worst and frantically sets out to look for him. He reads Tim's doodles on his appointment calendar, as well as past letters Tim wrote to Kim and himself, trying to determine where he might have gone to (as he said on his dayplanner) "go swimming," a euphemism he often used for getting his life back on track. Kim concludes that he must have gone back to their almamater, Austin College, which was a time of relative stability in their lives, despite Tim's nervous breakdown. On arrival at the college, he meets a young undergrad who reminds him of he and his brother at that age, and together they search the campus and a rural art colony that also had memories for them. Along the way, Kim rereads more of Tim's letters, triggering so much guilt and depression of his own that the young accomplice becomes his caretaker of sorts. This is an extremely emotional, complex story, and the reader can't hope to experience it in the same way as the author. Perhaps that is the one fault of the book, in that the interaction between the brothers (primarily through the letters between them, which make up a large and tedious part of the book, serving as the way in which the author flashes back to fill in details about themselves) is too unique and dysfunctional to be interpreted easily by the average reader. Nevertheless, the book is a powerful, intelligently-conceived and written memoir about brotherly love, guilt, responsibility, finding laughter in a lifetime of pain, hope and love. Four stars out of five.