“Take every minute, one at a time. Don’t be fooled by a perfect sea at any given moment. Accept and rise to whatever circumstance presents itself. Be in it full tilt, your best self. Summon your courage, your true grit. When the body fades, don’t let negative edges of despair creep in. Allowing flecks of negativity leads to a Pandora’s box syndrome. You can’t stop the doubts once you consent to let them seep into your tired, weakened brain. You must set your will. Set it now. Let nothing penetrate or cripple it.”

Diana Nyad’s pulse-pounding memoir opens on September 23, 2011 on a sultry Havana afternoon. The marathon swimmer, accompanied by a 35-person support crew (including shark divers, ER and sports medicine doctors) dubbed the Xtreme Dream Team, is about to embark on a grand ocean adventure, the “swimmer’s Mount Everest,” a 103-plus-mile crossing from Cuba to Key West, Florida, through the Gulf Stream’s powerfully raging waters, eddies and crosscurrents.

"FIND A WAY tells the captivating story of one proud ocean traveler’s journey to achieve her Impossible Dream."

Watching the golden yellow sunset spread across the horizon, Nyad makes steady progress, swimming in sync with kayakers, contentedly singing Bob Dylan tunes and counting strokes in four languages (in her 20s, she was a Ph.D. candidate in comparative literature) until she feels a sudden, sharp unmistakable sting of a jellyfish, followed by a penetrating burning “otherworldly pain,” compromised breathing and a sensation of paralysis. With help from the expert medical team, the swimmer manages to get back in the water, but the life-threatening encounter with box jellyfish turns not to be an isolated event. When Nyad feels the ravaging pain a second time, her spinal cord seizes up. Defeated and crestfallen, the athlete and her team cover 81.7 miles in over 44 hours, but fail in accomplishing their historic feat.

The September 2011 event marked the 62-year-old’s third attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida. In 1978, at age 28, Nyad encountered “Mother Nature on steroids,” raging whitecaps and whipping winds, got violently sick while swimming in a shark cage and lost over 30 pounds during the nearly 42-hour expedition. In August 2011, Nyad swam 18 hours in pulmonary distress after coming against a massive swarm of moon jellyfish.

For the marathon swimmer, “The spirit of the quest is grand.” While FIND A WAY largely focuses on the Cuba-to-Florida swims (she reaches her goal on the fifth attempt, landing on Key West’s Smathers Beach on Labor Day, 2013, after swimming 100.86 miles in over 52 hours), Nyad also compellingly chronicles the dark episodes of her youth (marked by sexual abuse and “covert molestation”), splendid college years (reading Sartre, Turgenev, Flaubert), dazzling romances (at 25, she fell in love-at-first-sight with a magazine editor who resembled a young Elizabeth Taylor), open water achievements (she was the seventh documented female to swim around Manhattan) and grand adventures traveling the globe as a broadcaster and journalist (including covering events for “ABC’s Wide World of Sports”).

FIND A WAY tells the captivating story of one proud ocean traveler’s journey to achieve her Impossible Dream. Nyad’s memoir is an inspiring personal account of persistence and endurance (“I am simply unwilling to accept blanket limits about the ceiling of performance”), perseverance and courage (“Do we inherit a will to push on? Do we survive a childhood ordeal that makes us gritty?”) and unwavering belief (“Go far as defiance”). But it’s also a call to action. Quoting the poet Mary Oliver, Nyad asks, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”