Tag Archives: nonfiction

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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December 28, 2025 · 11:57 pm

Saving Time: Read it before the new year?

I came to Jenny Odell’s Saving Time after reading Teaching Where You Are with my team. Teaching Where You Are had arguments about slow pedagogy and the relentless pace of post-secondary work that I found a useful reminder both of colonial efforts to organize time for Productivity and Efficiency. Around the same time I heard Odell on a podcast and so picked up Saving Time.

It is – perhaps with purpose – a slow read. There’s a lot of referencing other things and then referencing of the text itself and a sort of spiralling of the ideas on top of one another. I came away though having a renewed understanding that the constant experience of fast- short- not-enough time that I live in is a consequence of capital and gender, and that my temporal existence is eased by my race and class and that time, too, can be weaponized in arguments of more efficiency, more productivity, who gets to ‘afford’ leisure and under whose time crush that leisure comes.

The idea that women experience the press of time differently wasn’t a new idea to me – I could haven’t passed first year women’s studies without an awareness of the free domestic and emotional labour extracted – but there was a fresh pierce to it in my current reading moment, even as I reflected on the privilege I hold paying for childcare when I need it.

Perhaps the freshest idea for me – and in some ways the most terrifying and comforting – was the reminder of the excess boundaries of planetary time that are not concerned with the whisper of a moment of my life – and certainly not whether I get the laundry folded today, or a report filed that no one was going to read anyway. And with that length the existential angst and terror of our unfolding climate catastrophe a reminder from Odell that the future is long, too, and we might still write parts of it.

So in a year when the argument of AI has been More, Faster, Efficient, More, Faster, Productivity – alongside the worrisome avoidance of any conversation about the environmental cost of doing so – I’d recommend Saving Time (and yes, read that both ways – both hoarding your time for later, and that it is time to save the planet) for your 2026 first read.

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August 18, 2023 · 7:04 pm

All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: What a bad title for an excellent book

Rebecca Donner’s biography of her great-great aunt, Mildred Harnack, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, is great (though the title is impossible for me to remember thus making it terrible when I try to recommend it). It has a thriller vibe as the resistance forms and fights in Berlin leading up to and during the Second World War. The cast of characters (I know, I know, they’re people) feel sharp and present – the best kind of biography for me is one where you can forget its non-fiction. And how wonderful to have recovered the story of Harnack, all but forgotten, from fragments and trace references, and to bring her heroism to the contemporary moment.

Harnack’s heroism is her bafflement that those around her are quiescent amid the rise of Hitler. Everyone, she thinks, seems to think someone else will solve the problem of Hitler, someone else will put a stop to the madness.

Most pressing to a reader in 2023 are the questions of what we do ourselves amid our parallel moment. Bravery is not my strong suit, and so I’ll simply suggest you read this one, and think about accrual of silence and shrugs. Sort of like how I approach choosing take-out on Friday nights, and then find myself annoyed that we’ve ended up with shawarma. Once again.

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January 14, 2016 · 9:20 pm

H is for Hawk: In which I read non-fiction and nothing explodes

H is for Hawk is non-fiction. It’s not the book’s fault. It’s the story of a real woman (author Helen MacDonald) and her real hawk (Mable). And it has gorgeous writing. Really beautiful stuff. The kind that makes you stop and read it out loud to whoever is in the room with you (which, thankfully, was only S. and not my fellow bus passengers – though I bet they’d have appreciated the beauty, too).

It’s also kind of slow. Helen’s father dies. She gets a baby hawk. She teaches the hawk to hunt. She experiences depression. She mourns. It’s not the plot of a novel; it’s the plot of someone’s life, Helen’s life. Well, it would be except that the book also includes a sort of mini-biography within the memoir of falconer and author T H White. The bits about White were… distracting and dull. I suspect they were meant to illuminate ideas about Helen’s life and her work towards healing. Suffice it to say I found the parts about Helen and Mabel more engaging and enriching. I found it hard to make the leap between White and Helen, as if the relationship between the two was meaningful for Helen, but not sufficiently argued for me to see the connection.

Don’t get me wrong: It’s not all about engagement and excitement. I appreciated that much of this book was thematically and structurally about patience. Waiting for the hawk, waiting for grief, waiting for plot. It’s also about time. And about how our sense of our self shifts in place, time and relationship. And space – the contours and power of a specific location. I appreciated the gentle and the meditative. I really did.

And there’s no but. Just the caution that you might expect long – and elegant and surprising and sharp – explorations of landscape and a bird’s movement through it. Plus some brambles.

Read it for the beautiful writing. And let me know what you think.

 

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