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— Book Synopsis —

Shelley Gilbert
Swimming Naked with Jellyfish
The coming-of-age story of a girl who hates semicolons, loves extremes, and lives her life exposed.

DEBUT AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL

Swimming Naked with Jellyfish, 76,000 words, 339 pages, is Shelley Gilbert's coming-of-age, debut autobiographical novel. Iris Andrea, with her father's defiant spirit, confronts her grief over multiple loss of family by writing her memoir. She flashes back to growing up in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn in the 1950s-1960s, then fast forwards to an immediate presence of understanding. Connecting past to present, Iris discovers her identity, her sense of self and self-worth. She digs up intense childhood anger for her beloved, tyrant father, passive mother and jealous sister. But as the dust settles, she also finds love for her family.

She powerfully narrates how her encounters with her violent father forge her backbone into a thunderbolt, and how her freedom-loving nature rebels against the trapped submissive females of her family by escaping with the uninhibited males. She discloses an insecure, sensual adolescence throbbing in the birth of Rock and Roll, all her firsts, her taste in men, shame and attempted suicide, failed marriage, great passion and tragedy.

Though her outpouring reveals her true identity, Iris feels a stranger still lives within. She realizes she's always searching to fill the holes in her whole.