As long as it's a regular day, not too rough to begin with, the ocean is pretty smooth once you make it out past the first set of waves. That's why people are afriad to swim in the ocean. They try to jump over those waves and get slammed down to the bottom and pulled across the sand like a piece of shell. You've got to go throught them, dive under just when they're rising up for you, set your direction, close your eyes, and just swim like hell. Once you get throught that, you'll find there isn't a better place for swimming because it's the ocean and it goes on forever. You don't have to see anyone if you don't want to. If you look out, away from the beach, it's easy to imagine that there's no one else but you in the whole world, you and maybe a couple of sea gulls.

Bernard Academy a private non-parochial Catholic school for girls run by the Sisters of Mercy. Awards and honors
Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize (Taft)
PEN/Faulkner Award (Bel Canto)
Orange Prize (Bel Canto)
BookSense Book of the Year (Bel Canto)
National Book Critics Circle Award finalist (Bel Canto)
2011: Wellcome Trust Book Prize shortlist (State of Wonder)


Bibliography


Novels
The Patron Saint of Liars (1992)
Taft (1994)
The Magician's Assistant (1997)
Bel Canto (2001)
Run (2007)
State of Wonder (2011)


Nonfiction
Truth & Beauty: A Friendship (2004)
What now? (2008)
The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life (2011). Her third novel The Magician’s Assistant was released in 1997.

She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and received the Nashville Banner Tennessee Writer of the Year Award in 1994. She received the Orange Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2002 for her novel Bel Canto.