Colombe Schneck is an award-winning French writer with experience directing film documentaries, a background in journalism, and the author of twelve published novels. Schneck’s literary accomplishments have been recognized by many prestigious awards from the Académie Française, Madame Figaro, and the Société des Gens de Lettres. Schneck is releasing a new book titled Swimming in Paris on May 14th 2024, available for signing in our Storefront during this event.
Born and raised in Texas, Merritt Tierce is an author whose literature has been recognized by the Whiting Foundation and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Her most recent publication, Love me Back, was awarded the Texas Institute of Letters Steven Turner Award for “Best First Published Fiction.” Tierce has a background in being an advocate for women’s rights, particularly in terms of abortion. Further, Tierce has experience screenwriting, and wrote for two seasons of the Netflix show, Orange is the New Black.
This conversation with Colombe Schneck and Merritt Tierce will be moderated by 100W Corsicana resident alumna Dr. Alysia Nicole Harris. Book signing and refreshments to follow the conversation. This event is part of the release tour of Swimming in Paris translated from French into English by Lauren Elkin and Natasha Lehrer, published by Penguin Press. Program support by Villa Albertine and Consulat Genéral de France à Houston.
Swimming in Paris is a woman’s personal journey through abortion, sex, friendship, love, and swimming.
At fifty years old, while taking swimming lessons, I finally realized that my body was not actually as incompetent as I’d thought. My physical gestures had been, until then, small, worried, tense. In swimming I learned to extend them. I saw male bodies swimming beside me, and I swam past them, I was delighted, my breasts got smaller, my uterus stopped working. My body, by showing me who I was, allowed me to become fully myself.
In Seventeen, Friendship, and Swimming, Colombe Schneck orchestrates a coming-of-age in three movements. Beautiful, masterfully controlled, yet filled with pathos, they invite the reader into a decades-long evolution of sexuality, bodily autonomy, friendship, and loss.
Schneck’s prose maintains an unwavering intimacy, whether conjuring a teenage abortion in the midst of a privileged Parisian upbringing, the nuance of a long friendship, or a midlife romance. Swimming in Paris is an immersive, propulsive triptych—fundamentally human in its tender concern for every messy and glorious reality of the body, and deeply wise in its understanding of both desire and of letting go. This book is a Natalie Portman Book Club Pick.
Published in 2015 by Knopf, Love Me Back is "Sharp and dangerous and breathtaking.... A defiant story about a young woman choosing the life and motherhood that is best for her, without apology.” —Roxane Gay, bestselling author of Bad Feminist.
Marie is a waitress at an upscale Dallas steakhouse, attuned to the appetites of her patrons and gifted at hiding her private struggle as a young single mother behind an easy smile and a crisp white apron. It’s a world of long hours and late nights, and Marie often gives in to self-destructive impulses, losing herself in a tangle of bodies and urgent highs as her desire for obliteration competes with a stubborn will to survive.
Pulsing with a fierce and feral energy, Love Me Back is an unapologetic portrait of a woman cutting a precarious path through early adulthood and the herald of a powerful new voice in American fiction.
