Book review: 'A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck'

"Whatever held the Baileys together was stranger and plainer than love, harder to come by, and even harder to explain."

(Image credit: Bailey Family)

Sophie Elmhirst's fascinating first book is "so much more than a shipwreck tale," said Laurie Hertzel in The Boston Globe. In 1973, Maurice and Maralyn Bailey were sailing toward the Galápagos Islands when a sperm whale rammed their yacht and left them stranded at sea for the next 118 days on a tiny inflatable raft and 9-foot dinghy. Elmhirst has turned the British couple's tale of survival into a portrait of a marriage. "What else is a marriage," she writes, "if not being stuck on a small raft with someone and trying to survive?" In this case, Maralyn was strong-minded, Maurice ready to quit and die. In the end, though, their union, "for all its oddities," emerges as a true partnership.

"As harrowing and gripping as the Baileys' story is, the real star of this book is its dazzling writer," said Chris Hewitt in The Minnesota Star Tribune. Elmhirst, a journalist, "succeeds at everything she attempts," whether waxing poetic about the open Pacific and its teeming life forms or psycho-analyzing her two lead characters. The "real meat of the book" is Elmhirst's effort to understand how the Baileys' relationship was strengthened rather than wrecked by their joint ordeal. Maurice was so misanthropic that he'd insisted on sailing the ocean without a radio, while Maralyn's adventurousness was built on an optimism that never failed her. It was Maralyn who devised most of the couple's lifesaving hacks, such as storing rainwater for drinking and catching and eating turtles. She also helped keep herself and her husband sane by fashioning a deck of playing cards from spare paper and reading aloud from a Shakespeare book they'd salvaged. "Like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, except without all the yelling and drinking, A Marriage at Sea is a clear-eyed, insightful anatomy of a marriage."

"It's billed as a love story; I don't know if it is," said Dan Piepenbring in Harper's. "Whatever held the Baileys together was stranger and plainer than love, harder to come by, and even harder to explain." Elmhirst tells us that they went back to sea for 14 months on a second yacht and notes how crazy that was, but I ached to know more about what their marriage was like in subsequent years and why, like so many couples, they felt bound to experience those years together. Still, A Marriage at Sea is "an enthralling account of how the commonest hazards of married life—claustrophobia, codependence, boundarylessness—become totalized amid disaster," said Jessica Winter in The New Yorker. The book "honors the courage and resourcefulness of the Baileys in visceral detail," while showing deep compassion both for the story's heroine and her difficult mate.