A Marriage at Sea (A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck)

I’m not a fast reader but I polished off A Marriage at Sea in a matter of days. It is, as the cover says, a true story of love, obsession, and shipwreck. A young couple sells their home, buys a boat, and sets sail, leaving land and their lives behind indefinitely. But the book is also about how much we rely on each other, what it means to do the thing you’re truly meant to do in the world, and how essential hope is to our survival (relevant) because so much of the human experience is both uncertain and unknowable.

There’s a passage in the book where reporters can’t get the details right about the type of whale that wrecked the couple’s boat. So of course, the man realizes, they’ll never be able to put into words, let alone understand, what it was like to be adrift in a raft and utterly lost at sea for months, completely exposed to the weather, catching sharks and filleting turtles, surviving by your wits and luck alone. Apparently, it’s really the kind of thing you had to be there for.