Tag Archives: books

April 4, 2026 · 12:51 am

A Marriage At Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck; or, what is wrong with me

There must be something funny in my subconscious that it just keeps picking books about marriage, or divorce, or the complications of marriage or or – but it’s not that I’m seeking these books out. More that the ones that find might right now are… all of a theme. Call it the universe helping me work through it all.

Anyway, Sophie Elmhirt’s non-fiction A Marriage At Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck follows Maurice and Marilyn on their ill-fated sailing trip from one place to another (exact locations are used in the book, but dear reader, this writer does not care enough to look them up).

Before they set out on the journey we figure out the married couple are odd. Odd as individuals; odd as a couple. They decide to sell their house, built a boat over a few years and dedicate their lives to living at sea. Odd as it is to imagine doing such a thing yourself, odder still (to this reader anyway) that fate or fortune would bring together two people so similarly devoted.

But so goes the world, and so goes Maurice and Marilyn off to sea. ONLY TO BE SHIPWRECKED (it’s not a spoiler, it’s in the title) when a whale bashes up their boat. Honestly many reviews make much of this whale (maybe for the improbability of it?) but the whale did not feature heavily in my read of it, so much as the absolute nuttiness of them having set out without a radio (for the purity!) and working flares (just…. oops).

Of course we know the whole time that things must work out mostly okay because they survive to tell the tale (or at least that was my comfortable read of it until A. suggested that perhaps it was written posthumously based on journal entires and so I spent the rest of the book in gasping suspense worried they’d be eaten by a shark, or let’s be honest, starve/die of dyhydration/exposure etc).

I’ll give you the same gift of suspense and not tell you for sure, except to say that by and large the best parts of the book were not about shipwreck or (possible) survival, but instead were about how these two managed not to eat one another alive (and I don’t mean literally) in the torment of being alone at sea.

I’ve heard – though I am an unreliable narrator on this point – that marriage can be tough and requires Some Work to make it through. One can only guess the kind of fortitude being married while dying at sea requires. Actually, you don’t need to guess. You can read this gripping and engaging book and be reminded – and don’t we all need the reminder right now – of how much hope and love alone can accomplish.

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March 16, 2026 · 1:47 pm

Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil: In which I try to convince myself this vampire book is something more than a vampire book

Victoria Schwab’s Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil is the kind of book you will see on racks promising it will be an absorbing read (and it sort of is) and that is also literary (I’m less convinced) and also important or thematically rich (not really). But if you want a bit of a romp through lesbian vampires who are also complex because they Hunger (and at what point does hunger erase the vestiges of humanity?) and because they extract and exact Power – then sure, go for it.

I guess the parts most interesting are the way the different women-turned-vampires experience power and control. Sabine, the oldest and most badass of the vampires abuses her lover-turned-vampire-companion, Lottie. Lottie then exercises the limited control she has as an abuse victim – reckoning with her powerlessness against Sabine and demonstrating the oft trod adage that ‘leaving is rarely an event,’ which is to say, leaving an abusive relationship takes (according to the AI overview), on average, seven attempts. This part of the book – the reasons people stay in abusive relationships that are real (money, security, even love), the cycle of remorse and honeymoon and building tension and trigger, the way in which the past can haunt (in this case literally) – was the most interesting to me.

That said, I found it – in the end – over-the-top and as satisfied with itself for being intense as if it could just be the book without being so sure of its darkness and thematic complexity. I guess a similar reaction to reading The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue – same themes there (tortured immortality and the disintegration of self). So while a million places will recommend this book to you, take it from me and skip it – it is not nearly as interesting as it wants you to think it is.

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March 16, 2026 · 1:09 pm

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes: Necessary Edits

Dear Suzanne Collins,

What were you thinking? Maybe you were thinking that writing a prequel to the Hunger Games was a necessary extension of its literary universe. That you wanted, in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, to understand the motivations of the villain in the Hunger Games universe (Coriolanus Snow) and you thought giving us an epic 500+ page deep dive into his history would demonstrate the (repeated with a brick to the head obviousness) theme that people are complex and no one comes to bad choices without context.

While I hold the possibility that you were driven by artistic commitment to further exploration of these characters and their world, I’ll admit there were moments – tiny moments, really – where I doubted. Where I thought it might be possible you were writing this bloated and thematically obvious book to make a little more money. Cashing in, if you will.

And sure, the book started with a promising premise: Coriolanus and his family have lost everything and he needs to find a path back to fortune using his wits (and his female cousin’s body)(and his female tribute’s body). The Hunger Games are going to be that path and it’s interesting to see the games before they are ‘the games’ we know from Katniss. And maybe, just maybe, if the book had stopped at the point of the completion of the hunger games and we’d had something like a resolution there it might have avoided becoming (as it is) an exhausting slog through Who Even Cares Anymore to get to his eventual restoration.

It is a book that did not need to be written, and when it was, would have – should have – benefited from a sharp edit. That’s just my opinion though, and I am but one reader among the millions who bought the book or watched the movie. (To be clear: I borrowed my copy from the library and wouldn’t encourage anyone to spend actual dollars on it).

Respectfully,

E

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March 16, 2026 · 12:56 pm

Awake: A Memoir

You might be forgiven for thinking it a tad masochistic to read Awake: A Memoir which is, among other things, about the journey through divorce, at a time when I am doing the same. But! Hear me out. This is a very bad book, and there’s nothing misery loves more than silently judging something for being terrible (or in this case, publicly judging).

Jen Hatmaker writes Awake in the years after she awakes in the middle of the night to hear her then-husband on the phone with his mistress. Hatmaker had been married for twenty odd years, having wed young because of God and Christianity and Etc. In what follows we get short chapters that may or may not have been written with the intention of having them transcribed in cursive script onto a poster to hang – motivationally – on a kitchen wall. Live, laugh, love etc. We are, I think, to believe that Hatmaker’s journey from puddle of emotional ruin to self-actualized independence is one we can all travel are we simply to Focus and Let The Light Shine.

Alas, what Hatmaker spends zero attention on (at all) is the gross privilege she swims in. Oh sure, there’s a chapter where she is aghast to discover she doesn’t know a single thing about her finances or how they work, but there’s never a moment where financial insecurity poses a real threat. Implicit is the knowledge that this is a rich, white woman for whom things like the hydro bill have never properly kept her up at night. This financial security and abundance has the effect of affording (literally) Hatmaker and her children opportunities for ‘self exploration’ and ‘healing’ that include a month of (I kid you not) ‘me camp’ where Hatmaker can simply follow her bliss and #discover herself.

It would be one thing if this privilege were acknowledged and recognized as a security net for self-discovery and confidence that most divorcing women/people do not have access to, but alas, Hatmaker cheerfully narrates the memoir as if the abundance of hoteling and patio remodelling is a given.

Where I do credit her, and what I know I am learning on my own #journey (irony intended), is the incredible strength of community and the friendships that will find you when you need them most. I have been – am – overwhelmed by the care of a network of people (a constellation if you can imagine them all working in tandem to make something for me) who have surfaced – some after years of my neglected communication – to hold me, R and L up. And in this Hatmaker is right: you can pretend that you can survive something as uprooting as divorce alone, or you can submit to the humility of asking for and accepting help. And neither path is easy (how I have bristled at the realization that I alone cannot unstick my outdoor faucet or hang my own TV) but one path opens to more love.

I guess Hatmaker is also something of a Christian celebrity, and I do not envy her the microscope of judgement that must have accompanied her divorce. So while her memoir is kind of gross, I admire her willingness to write her journey publicly and to remind each this reader that shame has no place in this experience – we are all, in the end, just doing our best. Some of us happen to be doing it with enough money to spend a week in a villa.

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