Actress Lili Reinhart Wrote a Poetry Book 'Swimming Lessons'

The Riverdale actress, Lili Reinhart, just released her first collection of poems, Swimming Lessons, a 229-page book of dreamy prose exploring love, heartbreak, anxiety, and fame. Back in 2016, when Reinhart began filming the CW series that would launch her career, Reinhart says her life changed “very rapidly.” Writing helped her process the new spotlight. Swimming Lessons is a collection of poems Reinhart has written over the past five years, capturing “different emotions, different heartaches and different loves I’ve experienced at different times,” she says. Many fans might connect her description of a love turned sour refers to Reinhart’s ex and Riverdale costar Cole Sprouse, from whom she split earlier this year. But the actress says her poetry doesn’t just reflect the most recent happenings of her life. “People are going to try and draw conclusions from certain poems and be like ‘Oh, it’s about this!’ and sure, they can do that, but these poems are from multiple years,” she says.

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“If I’m going through something…I need to talk about it,” Reinhart, 24, told People magazine. “I’ll talk to my friends for hours, I’ll write about it for pages and pages in my journal, I’ll write countless poems about it.” Swimming Lessons, Reinhart reveals, feels like revisiting a chapter from her past life. “I’ll flip through the pages and remember exactly what I was writing about three years ago and how I felt,” she says. “It’s encouraging to see how in touch with my emotions I was.” Reinhart has spent the pandemic hiking, puzzling, walking her rescue pup Milo and writing a lot of poetry on her back porch. She had also shared that she went through a “spiritual awakening” while self-isolating at home in California. “I’ve gone through a lot of changes in my life,” she says. “It’s been very interesting to see how many people are not living in a conscious, present state.”