Kim Fairley is an artist and memoirist who writes about wrestling with secrets and the power of dealing with trauma. She was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, and is a graduate of the University of Southern California. She holds an MFA in Mixed Media from the University of Michigan. Her first book, Boreal Ties: Photographs and Two Diaries of the 1901 Peary Relief Expedition, chronicles the Arctic expedition of her great grandfather, Clarence Wyckoff. Kim lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Kim Fairley was twenty-four when she fell in love with and married a man who was fifty-seven. Something about Vern—his quirkiness, his humor, his devilish smile—made her feel an immediate connection with him. She quickly became pregnant, but instead of the idyllic interlude she’d imagined as she settled into married life and planned for their family, their love was soon tested by the ghosts of Vern’s past—a town, a house, a family, a memory.

Shooting Out the Lights is a May–December love story that explores the ongoing, wrenching aftermath of gun violence and the healing that comes with confronting the past.

In 1970s Cincinnati, Kim’s overwhelmed, financially stressed parents dragged her and her four younger siblings into swimming—starting with a nearby motel pool—as a way to keep them occupied and out of their way. When Kim was eleven, they began leaving the kids at home with a sitter while they traveled the Midwest, where they sold imported wooden ornaments from their motorhome. But when Kim’s six-year-old brother crashed his new Cheater Slick bike and the babysitter deserted the children, what started as an accident became a pattern: Mom and Dad leaving for weeks at a time and the kids wrestling with life’s emergencies on their own.

As Kim coped in the role of fill-in mother while dealing with the stresses of elite swimming, she struggled to shape her own life. She eventually found strength, competence and achievement through swimming—and became the second female swimmer to win a full ride to the University of Southern California, where she earned two national titles.

Swimming for My Life is a peek into the dark side of elite swimming as well as a tale of family bonds, reconciling with the past, and how it is possible to emerge from life’s toxic and lifesaving waters.