This Book is Written with Humor, Beauty, and Finesse

I thoroughly enjoyed Sea Wife by Amity Gage. I love to sail, and as a child we spent summers at a large area lake. I had one of those Kool cigarette sailboats which actually had a styrafoam hull, which we fiberglassed. Admittedly I do have a soft spot for books that involve sea voyages and sailing. In this book husband Michael talks his wife Juliet into buying a sailboat and taking their 7 and 3 yr old children on an extended sea voyage. 

The wife has experienced some kind of trauma stemming from her childhood, and her PTSD has gotten worse after the births of their two children. The couple is also having problems in their marriage, as couples sometimes do when redefining their roles and responsibilities once children arrive. Michael hopes the time together on the sailing adventure could be healing for both of them. After much discussion Juliet finally gives her husband the green light for their yearlong family sailboat cruise. Later, post voyage, a therapist she works with observes this about relationships, “Everyone is hard to love, if you do it for long enough.” 

Unbeknownst to Juliet, Michael has allowed Harry, the boat dealer, to be the mortgage holder on the boat for the shortfall he had in order to outright purchase the craft, and her husband has promised to return from their voyage by a particular date so the boat can be sold and they’ll each get money back. Much later she discovers her husband’s been ignoring the many emails Harry had been sending him after months of sailing, and it appears he’s missed the return date deadline, which is problematic as Harry’s already lined up another buyer for the boat. As the story continues, the plot thickens when Harry fails to show up for a standing luncheon date with friends after traveling to Cartagena, Columbia intending to meet up with Michael who was also there at the time with his family. 

It gets more interesting when after leaving Cartagena, Michael becomes sick with a high fever just as a massive storm is approaching, they are in the middle of five days sailing in open seas (no land is visible for the duration), and piloting the boat is left to Juliet alone. I literally could not set the book down, and was reading as fast as I could during the riveting storm narrative. 

This book is written with humor, beauty, and finesse. The narrative unfolds in the alternating voices of Michael and Juliet. There are hysterically funny passages, poignant and touching moments, and sections worthy of literary fiction.“ It’s very beautiful, you must understand, at night on a boat. When the sky is clear, the moon is as bright as a muted sun. You can read the face of a watch. You can apprehend the expression of a person clear across the boat. The moon flatters the sea. It electrifies the spindrift. It animates the clouds, riming their humped edges white. In its lambency, the clouds mount and tumble.” 

The author made her main characters compelling in the sense they were not all black or white, but two people who married for love. Just prior to graduation they passionately spent time together: “For a week, we stayed in bed like we were chained to it. We skipped all our classes. We joked that we were going to graduate summa cum loudly.” During their voyage they experience a wide spectrum of emotions toward each other as only two adults can who are confined for long periods of time on a sailboat, their emotional baggage gets unpacked, but it’s obvious these two have mutual respect and love between them at their core. During one clash Juliet expresses her frustration with Michael, “You’d think you would learn from the sea, I said. It’s all a collaboration. The sea feeds the corals and the corals feed the fish and the fish eat the stuff that smothers the corals… He stared out into the distance, looking miserable. We all start out life being helped, I said. We’re fed and held. That’s the way we all survive. But to you, help is imprisonment. It’s just another form of debt.”

Juliette later remembers a conversation with Michael, “You can’t stand feeling smothered. And the government—the government is like a smothering mother—“ “I do believe that,” he said. “Ah, hell, I said, plopping down on the hard cockpit bench. You, you, you. What if your liberty comes at a terrible cost to others? People who rely on the help you happen not to want?” He said nothing, only held his tender sides. “What about children? You have children. You’d think we could all agree at least about needing to make this world safe enough for kids.” Juliet later ruminates upon something Michael had said that deeply resonated with her, “Michael, I remember how you told me, one night in Salar, ‘I’ve lived my whole life with a land mind. Thinking land thoughts. But I want to think sea thoughts. I want to have a sea mind.’ I understand you now. If we had lived with sea minds, maybe we could have had a sea marriage. And we could have loved each other differently. That is, beyond deserving.” 

Whatever social constructs or diverse political points of view we all subscribe to, this book reminds us, Earthlings could do far worse than loving each other beyond deserving.