Glenn Stout: Daisy Ridley was "remarkable" as champion swimmer Gertrude Ederle
The sports historian discusses the strange and rewarding experience of his book Young Woman and the Sea becoming a movie. At least there's no cartoon duck.
Glenn Stout is the author of Young Woman and the Sea, a 2009 biography of Gertrude Ederle, who in 1926 became the first woman to swim across the English Channel. He also edited Long Lead’s “The Catch,” a profile of pioneering sports journalist Virginia Kraft by Emily Sohn.
This month, Disney is releasing a film adaptation of Stout’s book, starring Daisy Ridley as Ederle. Ahead of the film’s premiere, Depth Perception caught up with Stout to discuss what it was like having a book turned into a major motion picture. —Parker Molloy
Parker Molloy: Gertrude Ederle's story is a remarkable tale of perseverance and breaking barriers. What initially drew you to her story, and why did you feel it was important to bring her achievements to light in Young Woman and the Sea?"
Glenn Stout: I was drawn to her story simply because when I first encountered it, I was working on another book, and I kept on finding headlines in the old newspapers about Gertrude Ederle. And I said to myself, ‘Why don't I know who she is? Because she was front page news and she's swimming the English Channel and she's beating the men's record and all this amazing stuff.’ And I thought I was pretty good as a sports historian. I'd actually written quite a bit about women at that point, and I had no clue as to who she was.
So it started out as personal curiosity. And I took it from there. I figured if I was curious about her and found her story intriguing, that hopefully other people would as well.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month
Sunken by grief, Alenka Artnik found herself alone on a bridge, contemplating suicide. A decade later, she became one of the world’s greatest freedivers, holding several world records.
“The Depths She’ll Reach” examines how Artnik emerged from mental health struggles to push the limits of the human body.
Could you share some of the challenges you faced while researching for the book? Were there any surprising discoveries you made about Gertrude's life or the era she lived in?
Well, yes, I'd written a lot about the era, so I was pretty comfortable with that. But what I didn't realize going into the project really was the degree to which women had been boxed out of swimming. Almost culturally across the board, women simply did not swim. And when they did swim, they were burdened by these cumbersome swimming skirts and woolen stockings and everything like that. And that was all new to me.
I actually start the book with the story of this incredible boat tragedy in New York at the turn of the century, where a boat with over nearly 1,500 people — mostly women and children — burned. And most of the people on board the ship drowned. And many of them drowned in water that had they only stood up, they would have survived. But that was the degree to which the culture repressed women and kept them from fulfilling their physical capacities and learning to swim. And so that was all, that whole element of her story was something that I really didn't know until I really got into the research.
How involved have you been in the movie adaptation of your book?
They've kept me informed at every step of the way, which is really good of them because when you do, unless you're a Stephen King or someone like that, when your property is optioned, your control over it is gone. And I would tell people for years that they could turn Gertrude Ederle into a cartoon duck and have her swim across a mud puddle and there wouldn't be anything I could do about it.
But I was very fortunate because Jeff Nathanson, the screenwriter, is very professional, and he kept me in the loop all the way. I answered probably hundreds of queries from him along the way, just questions he had about Trudy or questions he had about any aspect of the book or the era. And that's really all you can hope for. I'm not a screenwriter, and I wouldn't presume to be one or to tell him how to write the screenplay.
But it was nice to just be consulted. And I was actually brought on set for a week when we were filming in Bulgaria. And oddly enough, like a question came up one of those days that it was kind of a good thing that I was there for. So that's been really great. It's a little strange seeing something you wrote being translated into another medium because there is no direct transfer.
Changes have to be made, and I understood all that going into it. So what makes me happy is that the core story, Trudy's character, her relationships, and the achievement itself are presented pretty much as they happened. And that was really important for me. Obviously in some other aspects because of the compression of time — you can spend 10 pages in a book, and they have to translate it into a scene that might last five seconds. So obviously they have to make some adaptations, but I'm really, really happy with how it all turned out, and I think people are going to be really responsive to it.
That was one of my other questions: Films often have to condense or alter elements from their source material. Are there aspects of Gertrude’s story that were particularly important to you to be retained or highlighted in the film?
Sure. The relationship with her sister, I always thought, was really, really important because Trudy was partially deaf. She'd had measles when she was younger and that caused partial deafness. So she was a little socially awkward, a little restrained. And she really depended on her older sister Meg, who was her champion. Meg was also involved in swimming when Trudy got started.
And I think it was that relationship that allowed Trudy to really blossom into the best swimmer she could be, into the best person she could be, because she had such wonderful support, primarily from her sister, but also from some other members of her family. And I was really, really happy that that relationship is at the center of the book and was preserved, because it would have been really easy to run right over that and turn this into a story of Trudy's coach and the role that he played or she played, in her life — she had two coaches, a man and a woman — but that's not there. So, well, that is there, but it's not the central story. The central story is this relationship, I think, with her family and her sister that gave her the confidence and the ability to do what she did.
“You can spend 10 pages in a book, and they have to translate it into a scene that might last five seconds…. but I’m really, really happy with how it all turned out.” —Glenn Stout
Excellent. And what are your thoughts on Daisy Ridley portraying her?
I think she did a remarkable job. It would have been very easy to do all this by green screen and CGI, and they didn't do that. There's maybe a little tiny bit of it, but like when I was there one day I saw Daisy in a soundstage water tank that's about 75 foot square, 25 feet deep, and they're making a wave, have a wave machine in the corner, and it's making waves four and five feet high.
And she was in there on and off for about six hours without complaint. And she trained in advance of the movie with Siobhan O 'Connor, who was an Olympic swimmer. And it was physically remarkable that she put herself through all that. And then the outdoor scenes were shot in the Black Sea and she did probably 95% of her own swimming there as well. So she really took it seriously, and I think by the end she probably could have competed. Although she has said since then she hasn't gone swimming once. She ended up with some ear trouble just as Trudy did from swimming as well, so that probably explains that.
In writing about Gertrude, how did you approach exploring her as a complex character, not just a sports icon? What do you hope readers and viewers understand about her personal struggles and triumphs?
You try to find out absolutely as much as you possibly can about a person. You read every single thing. And with Trudy, I did massive amounts of reading. And what starts to happen, even when you're reading counts of the same event, is this three -dimensional portrait starts to be layered in. And I think.
I really got a good sense of who she was as a person and the role that swimming and the water played in her life. That was the one place I think where she felt utterly comfortable. She was swimming from a young age. She'd go swimming by herself in the ocean. She felt comfortable there. She said it was almost like the ocean was another person. And I think that's really key to understanding her. She was not someone who set out to do something that was going to make her famous.
She set out to do something that she wanted to do because she enjoyed doing it. And particularly after the first swim where she was pulled out of the water, she just wanted to prove to everybody that she could really do this thing that she believed she could do. The fame, the celebrity, all that was after the fact. And she really didn't care about it. That's so refreshing, in this day and age, to see someone not chase after celebrity. Because today it seems like people chase after celebrity and then go, “Oh, I actually have to do something to earn this, don't I?” Trudy did what she did and that fulfilled her life goal.
Excellent. And that was going to be my last question: Is there a particular message or a sentiment that resonates more deeply in today's context?
Yes, it's a story of defying the odds and perseverance and all that, but it's also a story about being true to yourself and not being swayed by what everyone expects from you, what everyone wants from you. Because if Trudy had been swayed by what everybody expected from her, she wouldn't have ever started swimming. But she had the confidence to go in the water that first time and to swim and to compete and to continue to do so despite anything that the weather threw at her, anything that the organizations that ran sports threw at her, this sort of defined her and she was determined to be herself. And I think she succeeded.
More reading by Glenn Stout
Fenway 1912: The Birth of a Ballpark, a championship season, and Fenway’s Remarkable First Year (Mariner Books, 2012)
Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid: America’s Original Gangster Couple (Mariner Books, 2021)
The Selling of The Babe: The Deal that Changed Baseball and Created a Legend (Thomas Dunne, 2016)
Best American Sports Writing (Series editor)