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The Book Review
The True Story of a Married Couple Stranded at Sea
00:31:41
In "A Marriage at Sea," British journalist Sophie Elmhirst tells the gripping story of a British husband and wife in 1970s England who took to the high seas and found themselves stranded in the middle of the Pacific after a whale sank their boat. As Elmhirst tells host Gilbert Cruz, it's a story of personal survival, but it's also one about how a marriage holds together under the most stressful circumstances imaginable.
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- [00:00]
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This podcast is supported by Pure Leaf Iced Tea. Take a real break with Pure Leaf. Zero sugar iced tea. All the flavor, all the sweetness, zero calories. Finally, an iced tea without compromise. Refreshingly bold and sweet, but with zero trade offs. Time for a tea break. Time for a pure leaf.
- [00:41]
Gilbert Cruz
I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review podcast. I hope you had a wonderful Fourth of July holiday, everyone, and that you have found some time to relax somewhere and pick up a book that you'd been looking forward to. The subject of this week's episode is one that I have been looking forward to for several months. In June 1972, Maurice and Mary Marilyn Bailey left England intending to put their home country behind them and sail for New Zealand on Orland, the boat that they gave up everything to build. They had made it as far as the Pacific Ocean, the vast Pacific Ocean, nine months later when a whale slammed into Orland, sinking it. Their story of survival is the subject of the new book, A Marriage at Sea, A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck. That book's author, Sophie Elmhurst, is here with us. Hello, Sophie.
- [01:35]
Sophie Elmhurst
Hi. Great to be here.
- [01:38]
Gilbert Cruz
So your book has been out in England, where you're calling in from, for more than a year, so I imagine you're quite expert at talking about it by now. But how do you describe this book to people without giving away the entire story? Unless you want to give away the entire story. Tell us about it.
- [01:55]
Sophie Elmhurst
Sure. I guess it's obviously on one level, a story of a catastrophe. Right. It's this couple who set sail. They were trying to emigrate in their tiny boat and go to New Zealand, as you said, and there they are halfway around the world and they're hit by a whale. But I guess for me anyway, as writing the book, or when I was setting out on writing the book, I knew it wasn't just the story of the catastrophe that I wanted to write. What had pulled me into it initially was the idea of this happening to a marriage as much as to two individuals and what that would feel like from the inside. And in terms of how not to give away the whole thing, I don't think there needs to be a secret about the fact they survived. Right. Because it's a story of their whole lives as much as anything. And I was just as interested in the sort of aftermath of what they went through as I was in the endurance of it in itself. And I guess what I tend not to do is give away how exactly they're Rescued. Try and hold something back.
- [02:53]
Gilbert Cruz
Okay, we won't do that here. When did you first hear about this story?
- [02:58]
Sophie Elmhurst
So it was a while ago. I was researching a piece, I'm a journalist, about people trying to escape, especially escape the land. And I found myself trawling around, as you do in these moments, online and on a website devoted to castaway stories and shipwreck stories. And there were lots of photographs and tales of lone wild men who were pitched up on desert islands and had various escapades. And in among all of these was a tiny little black and white picture of a man and a woman. And she caught my eye because she was rare in this crowd. And I could tell also that there was something about them that seemed oddly familiar. And I don't know whether that is just me projecting in hindsight, but once I discovered they were English and that they had. They were from. In the 1970s, and just once I started learning more about them as characters, there was just something very identifiable about them, something culturally quite specific that felt familiar to me. And all sorts of that were just immediately fascinating and deeply unfamiliar, such as why you want to do something like this in the first place.
- [04:02]
Gilbert Cruz
Now, this is the compelling nugget of a story, the nucleus of a story. But as you say, you're a working journalist who. You come across stories all the time, presumably. Why was this the one to focus your first book on?
- [04:17]
Sophie Elmhurst
I'd been hunting, as you do, for a while, and as you say, I'm always writing stories of one kind or another. And of course, like, inevitably, I could tell the story was special. I couldn't believe I hadn't heard of it before, couldn't believe it had been forgotten. It's so extreme in its drama. The sheer length of time they're drifting in the Pacific, the behaviors they have to resort to, the beheading of turtles and eating of raw fish and eyeballs. And all of this stuff is just. It's gold, right? It's. The material is incredibly rich. But I think I just knew from the start it wasn't. That wasn't enough. That wasn't going to be the whole story, or couldn't be the whole story, or at least it wouldn't be enough for a book. Just to have the extremity, just to have the drama. And they really relied on finding this rich body of material from their own writing, their own books, but also their diaries, photographs, people who survived them because, sadly, they weren't alive anymore when I started my research. But friends and family and all these people, I Could talk to who could really bring them to life. Because I guess I knew from the beginning that if it needed to be, or if I wanted it to be a story of, I suppose, the sort of interior process of going through something like this, but also the an quite a sort of intimate examination of a marriage going through something like this, then I needed to really get under their skin. And that would require, I don't know, to put it in journalistic terms, a level of access that wouldn't be there just on the surface events. It needed another layer, I guess to.
- [05:42]
Gilbert Cruz
It you refer to some of the details involved in them being on the open seas for months and months. But it starts with these two people coming together and obviously opposites. Tract is a cliche, but Maurice and Marilyn were opposites in many ways. How did they come together and what were they like?
- [06:01]
Sophie Elmhurst
Yeah, it's funny, you talk to her half sister now and she still wonders at how they came together and is still mystified in some ways by what they saw in each other. Or specifically what she saw in him, which I can understand.
- [06:13]
Gilbert Cruz
Yeah, he's the one that seems like a very particular person. She just seems like a wonderfully optimistic, normal person. And not that Maurice wasn't, but the circumstances of his childhood perhaps turned him into someone who was a bit of a loner, very inward looking, didn't want to be around people very much.
- [06:30]
Sophie Elmhurst
That's right, he was, yeah, he was very socially awkward and very lacking in self confidence. And as you say, that came from a slightly affectionless childhood and a quite a tough upbringing. You know, he was unwell as a child and lonely, I think, as a child, which is something that can really last through life. And by the time he met her, he was in his late 20s and had established this quite solitary, routine existence. He lived alone, did his job and had his hobbies, which were these adventurous hobbies, sailing and hiking and the rest of it. But she was much younger, in her early 20s and still living at home with her parents. And when they met, this is the early 60s, we're talking to such a different time of gender and relationship norms. And she wasn't expected to leave home until she was married. And even then would likely have quite a sheltered and contained existence. Would probably give up work and have children and live a domestic life. But so in that sense, I imagined or I think identified a sense that he did offer her something quite significant, which was an opportunity not to live that life and a different form of existence. Basically. He didn't want to have kids he wasn't religious. He didn't pay any heed to the social or even moral expectations of the time. And I think that was incredibly liberating. I think through him she. He was like a portal to this alternative life. And obviously for him, she was a portal to just a life. Something which was a little more joyful and a little more spirited. And all the things that he dreamed of doing, but never would actually have done, left to his own devices, suddenly became possible with her.
- [08:00]
Gilbert Cruz
What was England like in, in the 60s and 70s in the places where they grew up and they lived?
- [08:06]
Sophie Elmhurst
Yeah, I mean, look, I wasn't alive at the time, so this is based on research and conversation. But I guess what struck me and something that I have had repeated conversations with my mother about actually is how six, we have this idea of the 60s and in reality it was a very different thing. Right. That we imagine at this time of opening and liberation. Whereas actually that's all in hindsight. And I think all those openings up of society took much longer. And in their own perceptions, I suppose. Maurice found where they were living in Derby, which was a town right in the middle of England. A fairly sort of stultifying place. A place which was quite narrow minded. He felt quite small in its horizons. And he wanted desperately to leave that world and to leave the land. He started to associate the limits of human civilization basically with just being on land.
- [08:54]
Gilbert Cruz
So you have this couple, you have Maurice, a man who is a bit different. He doesn't wanna have kids, doesn't necessarily like being around, but he is interested in experiencing the world. He knows how to fly planes. He likes climbing mountains or going for long walks. He just wants to escape this stultifying atmosphere of central England. He meets this wonderful younger woman who also doesn't want to experience the expectations that have been set upon her. And they come together. And you write this at the beginning of chapter three here and you say love, when it works, can feel like such a terrifying fluke. Two people have to choose and be chosen. And most unlikely of all, these choices must happen at roughly the same time. It's miraculous that these two found each other. But then they eventually made a decision that most people wouldn't make, which is the decision to leave their lives behind for the ocean. As you write, Marilyn first brought the idea up in late 1966. They didn't end up departing until many years later. How did they come to this decision and what happened in between that decision and the time they got on that boat?
- [10:04]
Sophie Elmhurst
How they came to the decision, I Think is we can put largely at Marilyn's door in the sense that she was someone who, I suppose, faced with the kind of possibility of doing something, would make sure she turned that into a reality. I think Maurice would have gone on talking about it forever, but not necessarily ever made it happen. But she was deeply pragmatic to her core. And she just started enacting the step by step process by which this. This thing would happen. And they sold their house, they sold all their belongings. They moved south to the south coast of England where they could start building the boat. This took a really, really long time. But I think it's also about, like, their different attitudes in a way, to. To the adventure. And like you said, he did have this love of adventure and a desire to be closer to nature and to be in a less populated place. The reason they wanted to go to New Zealand was to be more in wilderness. But I think it was also his desire to escape, I think, came from a slightly more, maybe inevitably negative place than hers. It was as much about the escape. Right. As it was what he was going towards.
- [11:05]
Gilbert Cruz
Right.
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Sophie Elmhurst
And I think that's. That was very interesting to me, that impulse to get away. And I wonder whether that stalled him in a way. It was as much of rejection of what he had as it was a kind of wanting desperately to make something happen.
- [11:17]
Gilbert Cruz
He also wrote to leave England and never come back. For Maurice, it was revelatory to start again, to shed everything that England contained. His past, his family, himself. It is an irresistible thought that we might be someone different somewhere else.
- [11:33]
Sophie Elmhurst
I think it was quite obvious in a way, and to people around him as well, that there was a desire to shake off himself as much as anything else. And of course, what you realize in these situations is that's the one thing you can't do wherever you go. But I think Marilyn's energy came from a more positive place and therefore made it more fulfillable. She wanted to go, she wanted to have this experience. And didn't see why anything should stop her that she didn't. She didn't see obstacles as obstacles. They were just things to pass through on your way to what you wanted to do. So I think she was pretty crucial to making this thing a reality.
- [12:06]
Gilbert Cruz
Yeah, I guess Maurice discovered something that maybe many of us discover at some point, which is you just cannot escape yourself. You bring yourself with you wherever you go. Even if it's on a raft in the middle of the Pacific.
- [12:18]
Sophie Elmhurst
Yeah, probably especially so.
- [12:20]
Gilbert Cruz
They depart England in June 1972, and they head towards New Zealand. And everything's going well for quite a while. Tell us what happened up until the point in March 1973 when a whale slammed into their boat, they set off.
- [12:37]
Sophie Elmhurst
And everything went extraordinarily smoothly. They did a classic route. They'd done huge amounts of preparation and research. They were meticulous in their preparations. They had built and rebuilt their boat many times over. And they plotted this route following a classic circumnavigation route of the globe. So they went down through Europe, over to Madeira, the Canary Islands, and then across the Atlantic. So they crossed an ocean without any problem at all. They had these sort of cloudless days and saw dolphins playing near the boat and arrived at the Caribbean islands, just in a kind of fantasy, really. And Marilyn, they described sort of Marilyn coming up, rushing up on deck at the first side of land, completely naked, and there's all these sort of fish and they're celebrating and they have an amazing time going from island to island, where they meet all sorts of other sailors who are doing the same thing. And Morris seems to come out of his shell in this rather extraordinary way and enjoys all these interactions and social events that they end up taking part in and eventually pass through the Panama Canal. And then that's when they're at the point of preparing for their Pacific crossing. And I think up to that point, they felt almost. I think if you've sailed for that long, you've crossed an ocean, you've already come up against quite brutal storms. I think anything seems possible. So I think they embarked on the Pacific crossing full of confidence, in a sense, of their own prowess, really.
- [14:03]
Gilbert Cruz
They decided not to have a radio transmitter. Was that wise or common, in my view?
- [14:11]
Sophie Elmhurst
Clearly not wise, and I don't think common. Obviously, they didn't have any of the technology or GPS or anything that you would have now. I think it speaks both revealingly to Morris's state of mind and his. What he wanted from the trip. It was really a kind of purist's method. He could have learned to navigate by the stars, and he had some basic navigational tools and instruments, but he wanted as little technology as possible. He wanted to prove to himself as much as anyone else that it was feasible to do something like this based on your own wits and your own skill. But he also wanted to be severed right from human society. This is the great ambition and the great desire to be truly out of touch with the land and with its human beings. And in a kind of, I don't know, strangely impressive and yet also quite sort of melancholic way. I think that was just very much in keeping with his character.
- [15:04]
Gilbert Cruz
We'll be right back.
- [15:21]
Ad Sponsor
This podcast is supported by Pure Leaf Iced Tea. Take a real break with Pure leaf. Zero sugar iced tea. All the flavor, all the sweetness, zero calories. Finally, an iced tea without compromise. Refreshingly bold and sweet, but with zero trade offs. Time for a tea break. Time for a pure leaf.
- [15:55]
Gilbert Cruz
Welcome back. This is the Book Review podcast and I'm Gilbert Cruz. I'm joined this week by Sophie Elmhurst, the author of A Marriage, at A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck. So Maurice and Marilyn embark on the Pacific leg of their journey. This leg does not go as well.
- [16:17]
Sophie Elmhurst
They're three days in, so they're aiming for the Galapagos. And it's only supposed to be about a 10 day journey. Again, they have it all mapped out. They know exactly what they're doing. And in the middle of the night, they swap over the watch every three hours through the night. And in the middle of the night, I think when Marilyn's on watch, she sees a. It's a rare sight in the Pacific, but a ship with light shining on the ocean. And she wonders what it is, doesn't think anything more of it. On they go. And in the morning, they are both downstairs, they're both down in the cabin and they feel the sensation of collision, basically. And once they rush up on deck and they see this huge sperm whale longer than their boat, they realize what's happened and they're transfixed by this site for a while and, and they describe themselves very eloquently. Just the sight of a whale bleeding into the ocean who's obviously been injured. And when they look back on it, they wonder if the ship they'd seen in the night was a whaling ship. They tried to piece it together, but. Doesn't matter. What's happened is that the whale has torn a chunk out of the side of their boat and the water's coming in. And within an hour, they have to make the decision to get off the boat, inflate their life rafts, get as much off as they can, and they then watch their boat sink quite quickly into the water.
- [17:26]
Gilbert Cruz
Marilyn could not swim, which, as someone who also cannot swim, seems doubly terrifying. Do you have any idea why she just. Even though they had years to prepare for this trip, as they were building the boat and living on the English coast, she just never learned.
- [17:43]
Sophie Elmhurst
Yeah, Maurice tried to teach her. There were efforts made, but I think she was just. She really knew her own mind. And if she wasn't going to do something, that was as clear to her as if she was gonna do something. And she just, I don't think, saw the urgency on a. If something went wrong, something was going to go wrong anyway, and so be it. What would happen would happen. She had quite a fateful approach to life, as would become very apparent once they were adrift on the raft. And I think she thought Morris would rescue her or somehow they would survive or they wouldn't. And I imagine there was also part of her thinking that something like that would never actually happen. But she was an optimist to her course. But, yeah, she never learned what, as.
- [18:20]
Gilbert Cruz
Best as you can tell, is it like out there in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? An ocean, when you look at it on a map or globe, just seems endless.
- [18:29]
Sophie Elmhurst
Oh, I have no idea. And this is where, as a nonfiction writer, I have to admit, or state the powers of research and imagination, because I spoke to a lot of sailors who had done trips. I've never been sailing, and I needed to talk to people to get that sensory experience of what it is to be in the middle of an ocean where you can't see land and where, you know, you're an incredibly long way from land. And it's amazing talking to people about that, because it is a very particular. I think just being that remote, and I think it's very hard to achieve on our planet of that degree of isolation. And I found it very moving. It was obviously something that Morris craved and in a way, that had become his object. In a way like when they've crossed the Atlantic earlier. That was one of his. The greatest causes of celebration was to finally be out of sight of land. And then, of course, when they're stranded in it, what was a cause of celebration becomes a kind of form of torture. They can't move. They have no agency. There is nothing to see. And that nothingness is its own source of terror.
- [19:31]
Gilbert Cruz
I definitely don't want to ruin any of the details in the middle of this book about what their experience was like out there for many months in the Pacific. I really do urge listeners to read this book, which is quite a journey. But I was wondering if you could just pick out a few that as. As a longtime journalist, as someone who's trying to craft a gripping nonfiction account, really stood out to you.
- [19:59]
Sophie Elmhurst
There's the obvious, like, basic physical facts of survival. And again, they describe this themselves very well, both in their books and in the diaries. It's a matter of factness to the Survival challenges they had figuring out how to catch fish with a safety pin. The muscular wrestles they would have to have with these turtles that would flock around their boat. And they started to eat as well. I think there's real. The real specificity in Marilyn having to get used to swallowing raw fish. The revulsion you would instinctively feel. And then by the end, how that translates into this kind of almost gung ho attitude towards it where they're just swiping birds that land on the raft and killing them and eating them. Or she's like practically grabbing sharks with her bare hands and hauling them into the boat. It's a phenomenal physical journey they go on. I think what was I found almost. I don't know, more horrifying on an existential level was the psychological process that they had to go through. And I think that comes through in some of their more reflective. Particularly with Morris, almost after the event, that I think it's quite hard for them to immediately process what that was. But he hits despair very early. He's plotting how to kill himself with a gas canister that they've managed to get off the boat. And she, meanwhile, is trying to keep him afloat, is wildly optimistic about their chances of survival. And he thinks she's crazy. But it's this kind of extraordinary, almost battle they have of wits and of attitude really, in terms of how they're gonna get through this experience. And it was some of those strategies that he had, whether it's like making playing cards out of bits of paper or forcing him to reread these two books that they've managed to have on board, or coming up with these mad, fantast dinner parties that they're going to have and writing out all these menus. So she has all these incredibly imaginative tactics, I suppose, to try and. To try and keep them going. And I found some of those almost the most moving and I suppose indicative of just the depths they had to reach and to graft through in order to keep going.
- [22:01]
Gilbert Cruz
What do you think you learned about what it takes to survive? You talk about the importance of psychology as much as the importance of how many supplies you have on board. And you write in your book it is not so much the feats of endurance that keep people alive as the absence of surrender. Which I think speaks to, again, these two different personalities that you have inhabiting this dinghy and this life raft.
- [22:25]
Sophie Elmhurst
I read quite a lot about the psychology of survival when I was doing this book. And something that really struck me from various case studies or anecdotes or psychological analyses of how people have survived in quite long term, challenging circumstances are like, about this idea of purpose and of occupation being really important. That if you're just stranded and doing nothing, despair can very quickly set in. And I think Marilyn had this extraordinary facility for understanding this in a very instinctive way. She knew they had to keep busy, she knew she had to keep Morris doing something. She had to keep his mind occupied. That it's a mind in repose that is one that starts consuming itself and dragging itself down. We all know that. Right. I don't think you have to be stranded in the middle of an ocean. And there was a partly. That's what also appealed to me about the story is that while it's so extreme, there is something very universal about what it exposes in their two different, very wildly different reactions to this crisis. Because I think we all know from periods of our life those moments of nothingness or where you lose a sense of purpose or a sense of direction, and how that is much worse than just facing something difficult but being driven to overcome it. And I think they typified these two wildly different responses to what they were facing. And she demonstrated this, as I say, this instinctive capac to generate activity and generate purpose, which was so crucial to his survival.
- [23:44]
Gilbert Cruz
Sophie, what's the longest you've ever been alone?
- [23:47]
Sophie Elmhurst
Oh, good question. I spent a week alone once writing in a hut. Was I completely alone? No, but I was alone a lot. But I don't. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty minimal, isn't it? It's pretty small for a. I don't.
- [24:03]
Gilbert Cruz
Think most people have anything approaching the. The level of solitude that these two people have. But I am always curious as to, particularly in our technology soaked world, how people find solitude. Can people sit and exist with their own thoughts for an extended period of time?
- [24:21]
Sophie Elmhurst
Yeah. But also, can people sit and exist with their partner?
- [24:26]
Gilbert Cruz
I was gonna ask you about that next, which is. Your book is called A Marriage at Sea. It's about being at sea, but it's also about being married. What do you think you learned about marriage from this story? Is there anything that one can extrapolate from it? I know this is a marriage under duress, a marriage in extreme circumstances.
- [24:43]
Sophie Elmhurst
I'm always wary of saying I've learned things because I'm not sure I ever have, or at least I changed my mind. But I did find them incredibly compelling and, I don't know, not inspiring, that isn't quite the right word, but instructive in some ways. In Terms of. Especially Marilyn, of course, in terms, as I say, what she had to find within herself and what she recognized she had to find for him. And I suppose it's that sort of collaboration. It's that realization of. Of the degree to which we can influence and create moods for each other that. That you don't just live as two in your isolated bubbles. That that sort of degree of connection and interreliance is constant. And you don't have to just be adrift on an ocean to realize that. And I think it was also understanding that Phyllis Rose, in her amazing book about Victorian married couples, talks about the kind of power that every marriage is, a sort of power dynamic, basically. And that I think it's absolutely true. It's where politics begins, or one of the places politics begins in the small p way is within a marriage. And that idea of who leads and who follows and who raises and who needs to be raised, all those endless shifting dynamics and how you can help each other as much as punish each other, I guess, when it's not good. But I think that just gave a lot of food for thought.
- [26:03]
Gilbert Cruz
You say you had never been sailing. You have never been sailing. What is your relationship to the sea?
- [26:10]
Sophie Elmhurst
I like to swim in it. And I like to swim in it. But, you know, where the land is close, it's there. I know I can get back to it. I know I grew up in England, so, you know, the coast is never that far away in this country. And my sister lives near the sea. And so I find myself on English beaches at all times of year and in all kinds of conditions. And I think that means you have a pretty healthy respect for its power. Writing this book has not made me, in any urgent way want to go sailing. However.
- [26:41]
Gilbert Cruz
It sounds like you learned one thing at least, right?
- [26:43]
Sophie Elmhurst
Yeah, that's clear.
- [26:44]
Gilbert Cruz
I'd love to hear about how you research this book because as you said and as you write in your book, Maurice and Marilyn wrote their own account. They wrote several books. What sources did you. Did you rely on? And then how did you balance using those primary sources while also trying to achieve a sense of interiority that allows us to, like, connect with the people under these extreme circumstances?
- [27:09]
Sophie Elmhurst
Those were absolutely the primary sources. I drew a lot from their books and their writing and interviews. They gave radio, tv, press interviews over the years. There was a huge amount of just them directly talking and writing to Joan, which was. But it was also, I knew, limited to a certain extent in that while it could give some of that interiority and sense of thought process. And in the case of her diary, very immediate thought and reaction about what they were going through. It was literally day by day, written and drawn while she was there on the raft. Which was an incredible thing to be able to have. But you're also then only reliant on their account of themselves. And I think what I also really wanted to do was to try and step outside them and understand their marriage from the outside, to understand their characters in ways that they might not have described themselves. And that was hugely to do with the people I spoke to, friends of theirs, relations, people who'd sailed with them. There were a couple of old friends, Colin Foskett, in particular, who was the last living member of these two married couples, who were friends from before they set off on this journey. And then accompanied them on the second big voyage they did after this one. And so he'd spent months on a boat with both of them. So he was just an incredibly generous interviewee. And could really tell me what that was like from the perspective of someone in that very confined and challenging and relentless space of a boat. And having to do all the things that you have to do on a voyage like that. And I think that it was talking to him also that really gave me that, I suppose, sort of that different perspective on Morris and some of his complexities and particularities, especially later in life. And that was really important for me to tell that. That side of the story. To cast forward into old age and to see what these lives that had this extraordinary episode early on in their life, what those lives became like. There's a version of the book that could have just ended with their rescue, but that was never the one I wanted to tell. And, yeah, I really depended on friends and neighbors and people who worked in cafes where they went. All sorts of different people to fill in a lot of those.
- [29:09]
Gilbert Cruz
Sophie, you often see this phrase with a nonfiction book like this. It's so gripping. It reads like a novel, which is great marketing. But as a journalist speaking to a journalist, I'm curious about how you try to achieve that effect while also understanding that nonfiction has to exist as its own thing, and it's good in its own right. And it doesn't necessarily need to be compared to a novel in order to be gripping.
- [29:36]
Sophie Elmhurst
The whole idea of the nonfiction novel or narrative nonfiction, you know, this is nothing new. I feel like in America, you guys do it and have been doing it for many decades, and very famously. And I think part of me was very consciously trying to emulate some of the books that have meant a lot to me over the years. From, I don't know, Truman Capote to Joan Didion. All sorts of amazing writers who have achieved that kind of narrative propulsion while writing about real events. What caught me about this story and made me think it was a book was, like I said before, the intimacy part of it and the character part of it. That sense of being inside people and of really trying to understand almost in real time, their motivations and why they do what they do. Those are all things that I suppose you find more often in novels. And so, I guess, inevitably, I ended up borrowing some of the novelistic devices and stretching, I suppose, some of the limits of nonfiction in order to do that.
- [30:27]
Gilbert Cruz
Sophie, surely you. And this happened to me while I was reading the book. You have thought about whether or not you or you and a loved one would be able to survive under similar circumstances. Would you?
- [30:40]
Sophie Elmhurst
Oh, heck, no. My husband and I had this conversation very early on. And he was very blunt and said he would just slide over the edge on day two with a little kind of salute. And I figured that I might have a couple more days in me or some sort of stubborn desire to carry on. But, you know, part, again, like, one of the reasons I was drawn to this story and these people was because immediately I identified much more strongly with Morris than I did with Marilyn. I wished I was a Marilyn, and I wished I had her sort of fortitude and optimism and pragmatism. But I lack in all those departments and make up for them in anxiety and self doubts. I don't hold that much hope for myself in such a scenario. I don't know. I like to think we can all. Maybe we would all surprise ourselves with some of those inner survival qualities we didn't know we had. Some sort of resilience would kick in, and maybe we'd all be strangling seabirds within a couple of weeks.
- [31:32]
Gilbert Cruz
Is this a thing that happens now when you go to parties or when you go to dinners? People go around the table and say, okay, how long do you think you would survive on a raft at sea?
- [31:42]
Sophie Elmhurst
Yeah. You know what happens a lot, which I am really enjoying, is that people come up to me at a reading or something and just tell me what would happen in their own marriage or their own partnership. Oh, my God, like, he. I couldn't trust him. He'd be a disaster. And they just. Yeah, I get. There's quite an intimate download on who performs what role in their marriage. And it does seem to be a prison through which people can quite quickly analyse their respective roles and skills or lack of them in their marriage, which has been enlightening, that's for sure.
- [32:09]
Gilbert Cruz
I'm definitely gonna start asking my friends, who would you be on this raft? How long do you think you can survive? Sophie, you've survived this interview. Thank you very much for speaking to us about your new book, A Marriage at Sea. It's such a great read and I'm so happy you joined us here.
- [32:24]
Sophie Elmhurst
Thanks so much for having me.
- [32:28]
Gilbert Cruz
That was my conversation with Sophie Elmhurst about her new nonfiction book, A Marriage at A True Story of Love, Obsession and Shipwreck. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and I would not last a week on the open seas. Thank you for listening.
- [32:47]
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