Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
My Weight in Water

My Weight in Water

Kleber-Diggs, Michael

Hardcover

Biographies GeneralSwimming & Diving

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1954118716
ISBN13: 9781954118713
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Published: Dec 31 2026
Language: English
A powerful exploration of race and swimming by a writer who see[s] the world whole, allowing daily intimacies against a backdrop of social injustice (New York Times).

Michael Kleber-Diggs and his twin brother, Martin, grew up in Kansas City, their family part of a prosperous community of Black medical professionals. Their father had never learned to swim, so when he wanted to buy a boat, their mother, a former lifeguard, agreed on the condition that her sons take swimming lessons. Then their father was murdered in an act of random violence, and everyone's lives changed--but for Michael, in the years and moves that followed, swimming remained a constant.

My Weight in Water is the intimate memoir of a swimmer. It is a story of race and recreation in America--of segregation, desegregation, and justice--told through one family and their lives in the Midwest. It is a reckoning with the concept of self-care and a plea for joy. Most of all, it is a book about what it means to love an activity that leaves you vulnerable--your mostly unclothed body in close proximity to other mostly unclothed bodies, moving through the same water--when you are marked as an outsider by both your race and your size.

Transparently and gloriously written, My Weight in Water is a definitively American work about what it costs one swimmer to enter the pool and why he does it anyway--imagining a future where all people have access to an activity that renders us weightless.

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