Swim Lit

I spoke with the fabulous Lindsay Zier-Vogel about The Last Wave and all things swimming, and was floored when she asked me how Martha was - it's amazing to find that the characters I've created are real to other people too!

"In Best's debut novel, The Last Wave, Martha, a devoted ocean swimmer who wears the second skin of her bathing suit tan for most of her life, never once steps foot in a pool. “The sea is alive, expansive; a pool is dead and confining. The sea is freedom. There is nothing in a pool: no current, no tide, no waves, and most of all, no history,” Best writes. 

In the book, Martha swims to escape just about everything—the drudgery of motherhood, the mind numbingly boring tasks of being a housewife and is so well crafted, when I spoke to Best this week, I had to keep myself from asking how Martha was doing. 

Best laughed. “She’s like an imaginary friend to me, too,” she says. “She’s good, she’s doing well.”