Forced Swimming Test

Eva Aldea

ISBN 10: 1917617151 / ISBN 13: 9781917617154

Published by Broken Sleep Books, 2025

About this Item

Seller Inventory # LU-9781917617154

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Forced Swimming Test
• Publisher: Broken Sleep Books
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1917617151
• ISBN 13: 9781917617154
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New
• Dimensions: 12.7W x 0.53H x 20.32D centimeters 12.7 centimeters width by 0.53 centimeters height by 20.32 centimeters depth
• Weight: 95 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Eva Aldea's Forced Swimming Test is a fiercely intelligent, unflinchingly honest meditation on mental health, neurodivergence, and the uneasy interplay between personal distress and systemic forces. In four interwoven essays, Aldea interrogates the legacy of her father's death and her mother's suicide attempts, while navigating her own lifelong relationship with antidepressants and a late diagnosis of neurodivergence. Moving between personal experience, critical analysis, and philosophical inquiry, she scrutinises the ways in which suffering is medicalised, emotion is pathologised, and capitalism demands resilience above all else. This is a work of rare clarity and depth-rigorous, unsettling, and ultimately transformative.

About the Author

Eva Aldea is a writer and artist, lecturer and editor. Her first novel Singapore (Holland House Books, 2023), and her book in progress, Stockholm, explore migration and belonging. She has written about the experience of taking nude selfies as a way of exploring body image and the gaze in the pamphlet Possible Selves (Intergraphia Books, 2024). Eva is interested in the relationship between diagnoses, physical and psychological, and writing, and edits writers' reflections on how these affect their craft on the website Dx: Diagnosis and Writing. Eva teaches literature, critical theory and creative writing. She is also freelance Editor in Chief at W.R.K.S Games.